#60daysofBlockchain - Day 5 - Maths all the way

Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. - Howard Thurman

(Excerpt from one of the posts, I read this morning on the LinkedIn)

Thank you to a LinkedIn user (I don't want to mention your name without your permission, however, cannot resist sharing the thought, you had quoted) , for introducing me to something that seems so appropriate in a myriad of thoughts going through my mind in the middle of changes happening to the status quo in my professional life. Agree, the only thing constant is change. And adapting to the change is the most appropriate thing to do.

So what makes me come alive? I feel alive when I see the problems that are interesting to solve. I feel alive when I learn about newer ways to solve those problems and it doesn't have to be my own creation. I rather feel energized and excited like a child when I discover new things. Going forward, I have to keep asking myself - what makes me come alive.

Too philosophical!! Well, I always resonate what Descartes mentioned ages back -

"je pense, donc je suis".

Let me translate that in plain English, it is - "I think, therefore I exist".

What has suddenly made my thinking so philosophical - well, is that the result of the 13 hours of Discrete Mathematics? Mathematics has a very interesting way of bringing logic to your thinking process. It is a process wherein you think of a problem - call it "conjecture" in mathematical terms, and then articulate your solution design as "theorems" once you find one. But one must understand that merely stating a "theorem" is not useful as you need to prove them to be true. No solution will be believed to be useful unless there is a substantial backing in term of proofs. There the process of finding proofs start and we start by finding out all the axioms in the form of assumptions which we take them as a premise to extend our thought process and also breaking down our solution in terms of lemma and then prove each of them. Sounds like a computer science project, isn't it? I felt like someone is introducing to Epics, RAIDs, user stories and solution design in some form of mathematical language.

A good reference to all the methods used for mathematical proofs can be found in Wikipedia.

One of the leaders, I used to work in the past influenced my thinking greatly by encouraging me to ask - "All this is good, so what?". This question is very important to ask whenever you think you have reached a milestone. In this case, the answer to "So what" can be found in what will leverage your understanding of Discrete Mathematics and that is my next destination - "Cryptography".

More on this after, I have finished my course on Cryptography. Thanks to Coursera and Stanford University for making it available for free to the avid learners.

Thanks for accompanying me on this interesting journey so far.