I never had fun with calculus until many years after university when I started studying it for curiosity and pleasure rather than because I had to.

I was fortunate to have the assistance of a mathematician friend of mine who would sit with me for an hour or so at a time and help me understand concepts I was struggling with.

My course of study ended up being a quest to understand and prove all the mathematical concepts I was looking at, and by the end of a about a year, I was taking a huge amount of joy in it.

Yes, I solved complex problem sets sometimes, but that was less important to me than understanding why the solution techniques worked. That’s something I entirely missed out on in my formal studies at university, when I hated math.

Real world application intrigued me also. I’ll never forget how cool I found some limit problems in differential calculus. I had no idea that packaging manufacturers use differential calculus to determine ideal shapes for their products.

I sat down one day and tried to do a materials problem like that without calculus, and it was torture. The amount of calculation necessary is ridiculous.

But as a differential calculus limit problem? I could solve it in just a few lines on a piece of note paper.

Your article really illustrates how much joy there is in mathematics, and I do wish there were some way to convey that better to students.