Why am I in pure math?

Many people asked me why I was in pure mathematics, here is my story. I grew up in Shangqiu, a small town in Henan Province, China. When I was young, people thought of math as mysterious and in their understanding, math was only useful for buying vegetables and meat. I was told girls only needed to learn math to avoid miscalculating grocery money, and men were the only ones who can succeed in math. At first, math was merely a course for me to get a decent grade in order to reach parent’s expectations. Things changed when I went to middle school. The first time I learned basic geometry, I encountered a question asking me to calculate the time needed for a circle to travel such that one side of the triangle will be the tangent line of the circle. It was at this moment I realized math has a dynamic quality and was not just numbers on the pages anymore. From that time, it truly opened a door of beauty to me. I saw the heart curve; I saw the spiral arrays of log x when x is a complex number; I saw math deceiving my eyes and giving me a 3D view; I saw where the mysterious Pi came from. Math is attractive to me not only because of the joy I get after conquering a tough problem, but also because of the intelligence that is underneath every theorem.
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本文作者为2015问吧奖学金卓越个人奖获得者：贾舒茗
学校：University of Waterloo
专业：Pure Math