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Discovering that the number 1 has n nth roots, eg there are three cube roots of 1. Blew my 16 year old mind and pushed me to go to university from a very workin
by kjellsbells 5y ago
Discovering that the number 1 has n nth roots, eg there are three cube roots of 1. Blew my 16 year old mind and pushed me to go to university from a very working class background where people didnt do such things.
Sadly, I then graduated into a horrible recession so the math degree was useless and i became a librarian. However, in the basement they had these mysterious computers they called roadrunners* and I learned UNIX. which led to my entire career.
*They were weird. Looked like tower PCs but ran some variant of SunOS on i386. I never saw them again.
- cplusplusfellow 5y agoMan, I had forgotten entirely about roadrunners. I am pretty sure when I went to Sun Micro for Java training in the 90s, we learned Java on computers that were called roadrunners.
- Mezzie 5y agoI like that there are two of us who liked computers from a working-class background that went into librarianship as an alternative, though you're before my time. I was a working-class girl and there was a lot of emphasis on picking a stable career as the one in my family most likely to 'succeed' (because that stability would let me help my family). Since I started college after the dot-com bust, computers were 'risky'.