Prelude

I am a geek.

This is one of the very few things in life for which there can be very, very little doubt; like death or taxes.

One of my most noticeable personal traits is curiosity. I love to know things. One of my dreams is to be like an encyclopedia, and know everything about everything. But when I think about myself more thoroughly, I realize that it's not the knowledge in itself; or rather, not just the knowledge. What I love is to learn. More, I love to be taught. It is much easier for me to learn something if a real person is out there to explain it to me.

I read (or maybe, sadly, used to read) a lot of books, and learn a lot of things from them, but I'm not able to retain information acquired from dead sources as well as I do when I listen to, and am able to see, people explaining things.

Another personal trait, and sometimes my pet peeve, is that I'm rarely surprised. I don't know if this, and my curiosity, are related by affinity or contradiction, but it's something undeniable. I have some sort of inborn (I assume; can't think about how I could have learnt it ...) a lack of expectations, or prejudice. An ingenuity of sorts, such that rarely, when learning anything about anything or anybody, I get the startled feeling of surprise.

Mind it, this doesn't mean I have no enthusiasm or passion. On the contrary, I'm very passionate (sometimes to the point of irrational absurdity): music, languages, tango, math, IT, ...

One thing that I like to discover (by myself or because somebody shows it to me), and that gives me a high feeling that could be (pleasant) surprise are connections, (unexpected) relations.

It's probably from this that comes my passion for math: the way each component is self-sufficient yet tightly intertwined with the other components, the beauty of its elegance in the formalized, crystalized parts, and the savage unexploredness of the new fields.

This is the reason why I've always been geared towards it. And why I always considered it my way of life, what I could use as my main survival business.

My other principal interest, IT, always felt more like an hobby, something I would do in my spare time and nothing more.

On the other hand, as time progressed, informatics and related fields of knowledge have absorbed a great deal of my time. And I suddenly found an unpleasant fracture between my academic training in pure math, and my progressive drift towards less mathematical aims.

Looking back, and out to others' experience, it might have been a better choice to take IT as my main course of study, and keep the math at the extracurricular interest level, but this is a feeling that not always convinces me.

Overall, nothing can be done now to change the past, but bridging the drift, or completing the switch, is something which ought to be done, sooner or later. And the sooner the better.