When I was a child, I was in love with writing. Even though I was not a fan of reading (which still does not make sense to me), the idea of writing a book sounded amazing to me. Over my childhood years, I probably wrote the first chapter of a hundred different books. None of them were any good, and I never had the motivation to keep writing after that, but it was a start. My second love, also my biggest, was for mathematics. In second grade, I learned multiplication and I was fascinated by the idea and how it works. I was good at it, too. My brother, who was in middle school at the time, would be doing math homework, and I would just yell out the answers. As I became a teenager and young adult, I figured that I could no longer do both writing and mathematics; they are almost completely different things. So I chose math. I went to college to be a math major, and I forgot about writing.
They are not completely different things, however. A liberal arts education has taught me that. Society has taken arts and writing and put them on one side of the spectrum, while mathematics and science are on the other. When thinking about someone in the arts, one does not suspect them to be good at math or science, and vice versa. It should not have to be this way. The world around us is full of arts and math. Writing and arts are the language of the people — they are how we communicate different things and show different emotions. Math and science are the language of the world — they are how the world communicates to us.
Communication is the key to everything in life, and we need both the arts and sciences to do so. When a mathematician sees a flower, they might see the Fibonacci sequence in the petals. This sequence is absolutely beautiful. When a writer sees a flower, they might see a beautiful piece of nature, the glow of the petals in the sunlight and the wonderful scent in the air. This is absolutely beautiful. Both the mathematician and the writer see the flower as an amazing thing, even if it is for different reasons. Einstein once said, "I am enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination." Both sides need imagination to do their jobs well.
They also need the imagination of each other. A scientist could always benefit from being able to see things for their true beauty and be able to show that in emotions. A artist could always benefit from being able to see things from a scientific point of view and see why it is the way it is.
The two subjects should not be on opposite sides of the spectrum. Yes, they are different, but every human being can experience everything using both of them. They help each other out. I am now minoring in creative writing, and I do not regret it at all. I will be doing math for the rest of my life, but now I will be able to show you why I love it.
