Mathematics; A story of indifference, love and opportunity...

To be very straightforward, I hated mathematics almost my entire student life. Can't really zero on to the precise reasons, it could be either biological wiring OR uninspiring teachers in the formative years OR both. Looking back after so many years, I think I had reasonable ability, even though I was not wired to be a genius in this subject.

To cut down a long story short, I studied mathematics for the 12 years in school and 2 years at engineering because it is essential to get to the next level; but things were about to change...

In our third year of a 5 year degree course, we had this beautiful subject called "Electromagnetic Field Theory" and it was taught by one of the two teachers who left a long term impression on my life; Mr. Basu. All of a sudden, I found myself dreaming differential equations and visualizing the flux lines crossing different surfaces and it was just wonderful. Maxwell's 4 equations had summed it (the subject) so well that I just wondered about the beauty of his thought for a really long time.

This was followed by another 2 subjects which gave further wings to my imagination. Communication theory and Digital Signal Processing. Even though I got a B in both of them, but it was great visualizing the signals represented by complex equations (no longer remember the stuff) and then doing transformations like Fourier, Z and Hilbert on them.

With graduation, I lost touch and never thought about this subject for a really long time. After so many years in industry, I am discovering the real potential of this subject. Right from solving the protein folding problem to drug design to predicting tiredness in an ATC's voice and (not to forget) the application of analytics to every field of modern industry and society, it is a tool which can help us debug and discover answers to some of the most difficult questions facing us.

Even though our current generation is largely ignorant about it's potential; I think that some of the biggest opportunities in business will emerge out of this field.

So my message to some of you who love this subject is; hang on and a great future awaits you, if you have the patience to discover the opportunity...