Sometime around fifth grade, I found and resurrected an old IBM PCjr and some manuals for it and something called "BASIC" from the basement of our house.  I, at the time, had no computer experience, but was still determined to find some productive purpose for this machine (which was quickly relocated to my room, along with the books.)  Ah-ha, success!  I turned the computer on, and a BASIC interpreter loaded from a cartridge, which I hadn't really paid much attention to.  After some thought and reading, I typed my first BASIC statement: "? 1+1" which quickly resulted in "2" followed by "OK."  I thought to myself, "Cool, now I can do my homework much faster!"  This resulted in me reading the BASIC manuals I found along with the computer, and eventually being able to write simple BASIC programs.  Today BASIC, tomorrow, the world.

    I eventually graduated from elementary school and by this time had become more mathematically inclined and was placed in sixth grade honours math and did quite well, but I rarely enjoyed doing the work.  Seventh grade was basically the same, except I had the same class as my best friend and was able to cause chaos much more effortlessly.  The first half of my eighth grade year, I spent taking a class identical to the class I took in seventh grade; I was annoyed, but did quite well.  I eventually moved to the school I attended in seventh grade, half way through my eighth grade year, and was placed in Algebra I/Pre-geometry.  I was also placed in a computer class there, for about 6 days before I got me and my best friend kicked out.  I was programming in Pascal, QBasic, Visual Basic, and some assembly for the Intel 80x86 processor at this point, constantly competing with my best friend.  One of the projects I created was an arbitrary precision calculator engine in QBasic; it operated fairly slow but could handle up to 32767 decimal places of precision!  Though division and square roots never quite worked right.

    I received a computer sometime around sixth or seventh grade, and before my freshman year in high school began, I decided Windows was not efficiently using it's resources.  So, I decided to install something my friend found, Linux, as an alternative to Windows.  So I got it (the Slackware distribution, version 3.3.0) and began to learn more about my computer than I ever knew I didn't know.  At this time, I was able to do most math very efficiently, and did not mind doing the work as much, but rarely did homework.  I especially detested pointless projects that attempted to teach us something by taking an extremely indirect route.  In fact, I often protested such projects by either refusing to do them, or by doing them and producing such complex results the teacher would not be able to grade without a serious investment of time.  Thus far in my high school career, I've taken Geometry, Algebra II, Algebra III, Probability and Statistics, Discrete Math, Trigonometry, and Pre-Calculus.  Each has helped in various projects that I've worked on over the years, especially my helicopter project.  That was an interesting failure that required the application of information I learned from most of the math classes I'd previously taken.

    Sometime my sophomore year, I learned the programming languages C, Tcl, and Perl.  Around the same time, I learned how to use `bc,' an arbitrary precision calculator and programmable arithmetic language, and created several projects with it (including an infinitely precise mandelbrot set.)  These programming languages allowed me to quickly develop complex ideas and prototype them with various results.  These results ranged from complete failure to software that was released to the open source community as free software (under the GNU Public License).

    Presently, math is an invaluable part of my daily life.  I use it everyday for many different things, both for work and recreational programming.  And I believe math has directly enhanced my life, as I enjoy programming.