This article is a modified version of the chapter in
Have You Ever Wondered?, the best-selling new book from Solas.

During my schooldays I hated maths with a vengeance. Maths was hard, maths was difficult, but above all it seemed to me to be mind-numbingly boring. I particularly hated negative numbers and would stop at nothing to avoid them. Terrible jokes aside, my dislike of maths wasn’t unusual for many of us struggle when it comes to anything to do with numbers; indeed it’s been remarked that there are three types of people in the world: those who can count and those who can’t.

What finally got me excited about maths in my late teens was when I discovered computers and in particular computer programming. Rather than numbers that described things (“six curries”, “three trips to the loo”, “one bad night’s sleep” etc.) with computers came numbers that did things. Give a computer the right numbers and it could play a game, draw a picture, or solve a problem.