[Image: blurry version of the Borromean-ring logo of the International Mathematics Union (IMU). For the non-blurry version, just click the blurry one. And no, I had nothing at all to do with the creation of this logo, or with the sciences of either mathematics or physics, really. My “breakthrough” was much smaller and more personal.]

I sort of straddled peer groups at my fairly small high school: sort of an academic/bookish nerd (hello, Latin honors student!), sort of an arty writer/photographer-wannabe (remind me to tell you about my James Thurber ripoffs), and sort of a pilotfish attached to the flank of the social center (it helps to develop crushes on school yearbook and newspaper editors). I even dabbled very superficially in athletics, and acquired a varsity letter in tennis to prove it. All of which pretty much set me on course for the life which followed: not quite one thing, not quite another, and really not very much of something else, but a mishmash of them all.

My personal Venn diagram might look something like the Borromean rings shown above: indistinct and formless enough that at any one time, I’m not quite sure what domain I’m occupying… assuming it is indeed just one domain at the moment. The so-called “credential” which I use most often when answering questions on Quora is: Not an expert in much; probably interested in it anyhow.

I took three year-long classes with one teacher, Mr. Hanlon: trigonometry, physics, and calculus. (Aside: all nominally in the nerd category. But because Mr. Hanlon also introduced me to photography, via the Camera Club, his influence also fed the wannabe artiste in me.)

Like many students in those three classes, I often had to grapple with what we (and maybe everyone) called “word problems.” These dressed up pure-math theory in the garb of applied math, so you might be asked something like, “If you’re in a train heading east at 30 miles per hour, and there’s a train 15 miles away, heading west at 45 miles per hour, how long do you have until the head-on collision?” Solving such problems, for me, often involved two steps: (a) untangling the language so I understood more or less exactly what the premise was, and (b) sketching out the specifics, often on graph paper, if (as here) the specifics lent themselves to being sketched.

But there was a specific subset of word problems quite different, in that while it involved words, and of course numbers, “solving” a given problem required no particular knowledge or manipulation of either. Instead, the solution — for me — simply consisted of… well, for lack of a better way of expressing it, simply consisted of flipping a switch. These were problems — and/or solutions — of unit conversion.

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