I mean, I really hate math. I blame my grade four math teacher for this. He was hired by my elementary school from some other high school somewhere in the world where they teach math to kids by yelling at them. As a nine year-old, I didn't like this too much, and neither did any of my classmates. Consequently, we finished grade four with no understanding of mathematics beyond third grade, and we have all suffered accordingly. (I don't keep in touch with many of these people, but I went to high school with a couple of them, and we all sucked rocks.)
When I got to university, my chosen major required me to take some math course - first year introductory calculus, actually. I went to the first class all fired up on math and promising to do a good job this year: I would study hard, and I would do well in this course. At the end of the hour-long lecture, I left the class feeling confused. It was a feeling I'd been harboring for about 45 minutes, actually, because I got really lost when the professor was in the process of explaining the marking scheme.
It was then that I realized that university was not going to be the fun journey I had anticipated since grade 8.
So I dropped out of that class after one lecture, because I knew it was hopeless. For the next semester, I enrolled in a slightly "easier" math class - MATH102, single-variable calculus. The calendar listed it as mathematics for social and biological scientists, and I figured it was almost as good as multivariate calculus. I waited four months for the first term to end, and came back in January full of resolve again.
Once more, I left the classroom confused. The grading system was still bewildering. And my professor had this funny Hungarian accent that made him very hard to understand most of the time. But I went to class, diligently, and worked hard. I flunked. Miserably. I seem to remember my mark posted using a single digit, and that was the combined score.
I decided that spring day outside my prof's office that I would use my rights as a university student to never, ever take another math course of any kind.
But he had some endearing traits. He would get lost on some tangent and start telling weird stories about his undergraduate days, and I have to wonder where he did them, because it sounds like he had access to some pretty hot drugs. He talked about his book and about his research into chaos theory, the one area of math I actually understand well enough to talk about (mostly because it correctly describes my living and work spaces). And he had a unique way of teaching complicated concepts: he would tell stories about mathematical figures. They wouldn't be ordinary stories, either, like the kind Jaime Escalante used in "Stand and Deliver." Oh no. No giggolos and girlfriends here, kids.
They were fairy tales. I think I learned and retained only one thing from his math class, and it had to do with e^x. Most people out there with even a scintilla of knowledge in mathematics (which I apparently lack) will realize that e^x is a special number. It can't be derived. This is the extent of my advanced calculus knowledge, and I remember it because it was taught to me by way of a fairy tale.
Here is that fairy tale.
"Once upon a time, there were two knights, two polynominals. They came across each other in the forest and decided to fight. 'But how shall we fight?' one knight asked the other. 'Shall we use swords? Shall we joust, or use arrows?' The second one said, 'Let us derivate each other!'
"So the fight began. The first knight kept getting smaller and smaller, while the second one stayed the same size. As the first knight turned from a polynominal into a constant, he cried out, 'But who are you?!' The final derivation turned him into a zero.
"The second knight stood victorious. And that knight's name was e^x."
There was another fairy tale about the princess and the chain-rule-based present from the handsome prince, but I don't remember the details.