By Axel Saenz
HAVANA TIMES – My love for mathematics began in my childhood when I was nine or ten years old, I slept in the same room as my grandparents for fear of sleeping alone. In those times my grandfather and I used to play before going to sleep, when the lights were off he would name me a country and I answered him with its capital or he would ask me mathematical questions that I solved in my mind to be able to answer them. In both cases he would correct me if I was wrong.
That is how I opened my mind to mathematical exercises and to the importance of numbers in everyday life. At that age when I went to run errands I was always told that I had to calculate how much money I had to get back, sometimes I also counted my steps to the nearest store.
I liked numbers a lot; but when sums, divisions and exponentials began to incorporate letters I started to hate them. Partly because I don’t like reading or writing and having my worst enemies right next to the numbers that had always accompanied me until then was an act of betrayal.
The subject I struggled with at that time was algebraic identities, I didn’t want to learn anything about it and I lost my school year. The next year I changed high schools, luckily, I was already used to changing schools so it didn’t affect me much.
In the new high school I had a math teacher that I liked very much, I liked the way she taught and I ended up learning the algebraic identities that I had so much trouble with before.
In the third year of high school the Math Olympics and the Language and Literature Olympics were held as two separate events, and I participated in both. But the important one for me was Mathematics.
The winner would compete against other high schools at the level of the municipality, and so on until the national level.
Well, I remember that among the participants there was a boy who came from my old high school. At that moment I felt like in the typical Spokon anime (sports anime) in which the participants prepare themselves before their tournaments and
