I did math for the first time when I was 29 years old. This isn’t a self-deprecating snipe or feigned humility. I did math for the first time when I was 29 years old. When I finally did it for the first time – at least, the first recorded time – I didn’t know it had happened. It was six years later reading Paul Lockhart’s excellent piece entitled, “A Mathematician’s Lament” that I realized what I’d done; I’d finally done math all those years ago. At the time I was pretty sure I was programming, or something close to it. It was one part statistics, one part algorithms, and one part math. I’m not even sure today what constitutes the whole of what I was doing, but those are without a doubt three of the parts. I was also pretty sure that I was doing something related to cancer. After all, I was doing what I was doing because I was getting paid for it. And I knew that the money came circuitously to me by way of the National Cancer Institute. And if there’s one thing I know about the NCI, I know that they care about fighting cancer. So I was probably doing something related to cancer, too.