You decided to become a math major, then study number theory!

woman holding books

It’s been seven years since that fateful career fair where you settled on math You took some more math classes in college and you just kept taking more cause you couldn’t get away from the stuff. Normal calculus, optimization problems, or numerical algorithms were fun but you truly fell in love with number theory. Something about talking about prime numbers and writing proofs just really got your heart racing all the way to grad school for a PhD specializing in cryptography.

You’ve been so busy, you haven’t seen your family since your cousins wedding last Spring and have barely talked to anyone outside of your research associates. Your world is filled with fever dreams of the Riemman Hypothesis and quantum computing resistant encryption ideas, further isolating yourself from society and any long lasting relationship with normal people. You made a point to drive home for Thanksgiving and you can finally catch up with not only your parents and siblings but even some of your extended family!

Your mom gives you a hug, you all sit down to snack on artichoke dip and she asks, “Tell me about school! What are you researching? Solve any cool calculus problems lately?” the room laughs and waits in anticipation. What do you do?

Sure, I’d love to explain my research

Oh I don’t know, it’s so complicated and specialized now, I don’t think y’all would be interested

Published by B McGraw

B McGraw has lived a long and successful professional life as a software developer and researcher. After completing his BS in spaghetti coding at the department of the dark arts at Cranberry Lemon in 2005 he wasted no time in getting a masters in debugging by print statement in 2008 and obtaining his PhD with research in screwing up repos on Github in 2014. That's when he could finally get paid. In 2018 B McGraw finally made the big step of defaulting on his student loans and began advancing his career by adding his name on other people's research papers after finding one grammatical mistake in the Peer Review process.

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