Her love/hatred for math has followed a function which can't be defined.

#She sat at the last bench of the classroom for 7th standard, looking at her watch now and then. The bell rung at the end of yet another hour at school, marking the beginning of the Maths class. She wiped the beads of sweat on her forehead with the sleeve of her shirt. That day, her maths teacher was going to return their graded tests they had last week.

They were supposed to do good on this one. It had only easy questions, the topper had said to her after the test. Somehow she only got 2 out of 20.

A muffled murmuring was the answer.

"All right, all of you below five marks, stand up with your left palm up." The sharp edged ruler felt like hot iron every time it slapped on her palm. Eventually, her soft palms grew tougher as years passed by.

She stood silent, her head hung low in fear.

"Look at me. What will you say? That you failed in Maths? That you couldn't even pass the mid-terms? What will you do in your boards? Do you want to sit at home and wash dishes with your mom? Failed in maths, such a failure..."

# "Hey, c-could you help me in this numerical?" she asked looking up at the guy who had nearly missed the entrance to IIT and landed up in the same college she had, by chance.

"Hm, sure, okay, so do that," he scribbled a few calculations on the empty page, "and this, and here, just plug these numbers and then just differentiate the equation you get. Then get x from there, got it?"

"Umm, so-um, okay I'll do them like that," she plugged the numbers, wrote the equation to be differentiated, "so the-the differentiation?" she said without looking up, pointing her pencil at the equation.

"C'mon it's easy. Can't you even differentiate? It's so simple!" he laughed at her, "What are you really doing in engineering? What are you doing here in this field?"

"I really wish I knew," she said and left.

Why, why, why, it's so.... beautiful? She must have pondered for a week on e. Because maths was what she had to learn. It was her life now. It couldn't be escaped.

# "So, this will go there and y will have an exponential increase with x and then I will formulate this equation, which will incorporate both the factors related. This will then be a one general equation and there won't be any need of separate equations. And then I would develop a model, based on the chemical analysis, whose predicted values I would verify with the ones obtained from the derived equation," she finished writing on the blackboard.

"What did you say how you got your Z value, over there?" asked her professor.

"That, I developed the equation for that. The existing equation is too simple and doesn't cover all the possible factors, but this one," she circled on the board full of numbers she had written in the past hour, "This one, does count for every possible factor. And it will be proved by multiple regression."

"It's good, it's good. It's good to think, it's always good to think different," the professor nodded his head a few times, "But I think you should just stick with the standard equations for now. Don't waste more time and energy over this. But it's good, it's good you're thinking, it's just that you're going lil bit too complex."

---
For all the math geeks, the movie "The Oxford Murders" is a must.