Here is an early memory that might make enjoyable telling.

Perhaps randomly, I suffered some traumas in infancy that led to a lot of repressed memories.  Recent counseling has also brought back other childhood memories, and one of them is my astonishment the first time I encountered division.  It was Grade Two, because I remember it was in the classroom where we would be the next year, and that was Grade Three with Mrs Stillman, whose brother Rod Stillman had a rose named after him, as I remember her telling us, and who had eaten some of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Cake. 

I recall a particular moment, because most of my memories are in the form of a snap-shot, like a single frame of a motion picture.  My images are still but not static, perhaps the same way pixels can have a vector quality of motion in a direction.  I do not recall who my teacher was that year, but I still have report cards from Junior School showing I was away sick more days than I attended.  She must have been away, so we were sent to the next room, and shared desks for a short time with those boys.  I was doing subtraction, which I must have only recently learnt.  

Reading was something that I discovered late in my childhood because I was away sick so much, and numbers also revealed their magic to me very slowly.  This particular early memory now stands out from all those empty years and is of seeing the other boy doing something that looked like subtraction but was quite different.  I ask him what it is and he tells me it is division, and I can look forward to learning it next year and then he warned me that it was very difficult.  We never spoke again.

Mathematical Functions have been a continual succession of discoveries ever since.  It was a source of wonder then and has never ceased to be.  I feel sorry for people who don’t see the absolute beauty in Mathematics that requires no eye to behold it, but is inherent beauty for its own sake, like ‘art pour l’Art’.  Tangentially, I think myself lucky now that I started to be interested in computers when they were simple things and it was easy to understand how to make one out of common electronic components and to program it to the limit of its capacity.  In contemporary times, apart from the tiny fraction of the population that writes Apps, most people are in total ignorance of the devices they spend most of their waking hours interacting with.     

My fascination with division (particularly into Primes) was quickly overtaken by the endless consequences of exponentiation, but it is the jump from division to differentiation that truly reveals the Magick.  Perhaps I am also lucky enough to have become expert with a slide-rule, which everyone had, but are never seen lying around in retro movies.  Then there were log-tables, accurate to four significant figures, sufficient for all practical purposes, apart from Rocket Science, while now I can almost instantly calculate a number with more decimal places that the largest known Prime.  What a wonderful world!