Back in first year as an Engineering student, I learnt all about convergent and divergent series. The subject utterly failed to inspire me - I couldn't wait to be done with having to apply one formula after another trying to come up with the sum to infinite terms of some series or figure out what the next entry in a sequence might be.

Today, as I read Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire, I am not merely interested, I am in awe. After all, what can you say to the fact that the series 1 + 1/(2^2) + 1/(3^2) + 1/(4^2)... converges to 1/6th of pi squared? The numbers we are adding up are just regular counting numbers - where did the pi come from - the same pi we all associate with the ratio of a circle's circumference and its radius?!! And there's so much more. Why and how do numbers like pi and e sneak up on you in the most unexpected of places? What do those numbers really mean? Is there a deeper truth waiting to be discovered, that will make mathematicians go `Aha, of course!'

At the one end, I am amazed by the beauty that lies in numbers, in the concepts of "the infinitesimal and the infinite", the striking simplicity of the statements of some conjectures that have defied proof for centuries.. At the other end, I am deeply pained that a subject so profound and beautiful could be so mangled and marred by an education system that it not only failed to inspire its students, but actually turned people away from mathematics altogether!

I doubt I will actually pursue a higher education or a career in mathematics, but I have at least had the good fortune of running into some wonderfully written books that have instilled in me a newfound respect for all that is number. Every time I come across an interesting proof or theorem, I feel like I've been admitted into a secret club - the password for the week has just been revealed to me! I go around feeling ecstatic, wanting to tell everyone I meet what I've just been privy to. Of course, the people I tell are either already in awe and totally in sync with me, or they couldn't care less! So, that leaves me with this blog, which means that you, the reader, will just have to put up with my gushing over some neat trick Gauss used when he was 10, or just the fact that I finally know what Riemann's zeta function means.