QUESTION: As a child were you always fascinated by mathematics? What were some of your other interests?

12/24/01 ANSWER: My childhood was divided into three parts - before ten, when I lived with my sister, mom and dad, from ten to fourteen when I lived with my sister, mom and mom's parents, and from fourteen to seventeen when I lived with my sister and mom. Let me answer the question for the first part of my childhood.

Up to age ten I was fascinated by a lot of different things and had many interests. To explain any fascination mathematics held for me, you have to understand that ``mathematics'' did not mean to me what it meant to most children, because my dad was a mathematician. What ``mathematics'' meant to me was dad's mathematics; pages of squiggles which I did not understand. On the few occasions when I asked him what a particular squiggle meant, the longer the explanation the more elusive it seemed to become.

When I was very young I was a bit of a tom-boy and liked wrestling, climbing in trees, playing soccer and that sort of thing, but I think my main interest was making things. I always had a few projects on the go - making up poetry, composing melodies, making clothes to wear, writing and acting in plays, designing buildings, making models and toys, and drawing and painting. Other than that I liked investigating things in the garden, collecting different wild grasses and analyzing them, digging up bits of buried pottery of which there was a great deal, and looking for unusual stones. One of the things most fascinating to me was sunshine, and the colored diffraction patterns you could make with it by looking at it through half closed eyes. I planned to find a way to reproduce that pattern exactly so that everyone could see it on cloudy days (remember this was England), preferably on fabric with phosphorescent thread.

In school nearly everything was interesting except perhaps spelling. I loved music and wanted to play the flute but we couldn't afford one so I learned the double bass instead because the school had one I could practise on. Probably the most interesting thing at school was the other children. My dad is Nigerian, which made my sister and me quite unusual in an English city of a hundred thousand people in 1970. Indeed, it affected our lives on a large scale. Every day, kids we didn't know called us names. Little girl friends were not all allowed to come over to our house and play. Little boy friends were very curious about the fact that we were different, and could never completely drop the subject. What did my being different mean for my future? That question was of very great concern to me. At a more fundamental level, there were some basic philosophical questions to sort out. Can one's unspoken thoughts influence the outside world? Will I always be me or might I one day wake up and find that I'm someone entirely different, with a different name and a different set of memories? There are lucky people whose identity is so well determined by tradition that these questions have obvious answers, but I felt the need to contemplate issues like these.

Now what about dad's mathematics - what emotions did one feel for something one understood so little about? For me it was definitely not in the same class as analyzing wild grasses, or doing mathematics at school. It was not just a harder version of mathematical puzzles that you could find to do on a rainy day. It was in the category of ``mysterious and extraordinary things'' - religion, science fiction (from the T.V. series Dr. Who), or fairy stories that are full of sorcery, with quests for unusual items and highly improbable coincidences. However, the crucial difference that distinguished mathematics from these other mysterious things was that my parents believed in it!