I went to a physics-and-maths class at school. I graduated with honours and a medal, worked with a tutor before university, and solved every trigonometry task in Skanavi (“Problems in Elementary Mathematics” and “Elementary Mathematics problem” books edited by Mark I. Skanavi) and even enjoyed doing this from time to time.
And all that time maths “lived in a sealed room” for me.
For me, it looked beautiful, demanding and completely disconnected from real life and my life particularly. I’m not talking about “two apples for Masha, one for Petya.” No, I’m talking about derivatives, matrices, tangents to a curve, the exponential and so on — and none of it seemed to touch anything real.
It was a private intellectual space that I sometimes enjoyed being in and sometimes I hated it or did not understand it or just rejected its value.
University didn’t change that. At the Belarusian National Technical University I happily solved algebra, wrote programs in Pascal, worked through theoretical mechanics and strength of materials subjects. I could solve almost anything put in front of me. I just couldn’t feel where any of it pressed against the world.
The first crack came years later, from an unexpected direction. I started reading about LLM’s, how transformers actually work — multi-layer perceptrons, multi-head attention. And the thing that stopped me cold: words. Words become vectors in n-dimensional space. Meaning becomes enormous matrices, multiplied at scale. The exact objects from my textbooks — the matrices I’d shuffled around in a vacuum — turned out to be the literal machinery of the thing now rewriting how all of us work. The abstractions weren’t abstract. They’d been standing right next to me the whole time, doing the work.
The second crack came from my own hands. Recently I built a customer survey for a founder, and then decided to make a tool to read it — a template where raw responses go in one end and answers come out the other. Which customer matters most. What stops people buying. What price holds. Whether the idea is a go, or a no. In general, nothing extraordinary, but for me personally it was a real insight.
And somewhere in that week — watching a wall of raw text sort itself into segments, watching a price surface on its own, watching a gate turn green — the maths stopped being something I admired from the outside. It was in my hands, making a real decision real for someone. The sealed room finally stopped being a room, it lost its walls, or better to say they dissolved.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. It took me more than twenty years to feel something I was taught at sixteen. Not because the teaching was bad (by the way, at my schools my last classes were quite stressful due to the teacher of maths, he was an underrated genius with a tough demeanor, but he was good at maths)— it was excellent — but because no one connected the machinery to the world, and I couldn’t make that leap alone. Most of us can’t.
So, a small wish for any teacher who finds this: show them where it lives.
One more thing, in case it isn’t obvious: an analyst’s work can look dry. But it is hard and wonderful at the same time. This is stunning – taking something raw and messy, and making it talk clearly.
PS. By the way, I’m between projects and reading through vacancies (some genuinely funny). If you need a Product Owner who gets this excited about making data speak — say hi. 😄
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