The Professor and the Plumber
How I 'live' my problems
I can remember the moment I decided to study math. And a decade later, I’m still at it.
I was fifteen. I was sitting at our wooden table, which was too big for our dining room. It was cheaper to take this chunky piece of furniture from our last home in Dubai. We moved houses frequently since my dad was in oil. My family and I had just spent ten years abroad, and we had just returned to our home country - Malaysia.
We were now in an apartment in a forest-y suburb of Kuala Lumpur. It was hot. The region has ninety percent humidity, and air conditioning is a must. It was sunny outside, yet dark indoors. The living room had a sort of 'oversaturated’ hue. I was home alone.
I had always liked science. As a kid, I watched a cartoon called Dexter’s laboratory. This red-headed kid with a Russian accent does experiments in a lab hidden behind his bookcase, only to have his experiments foiled by his hyperactive sister.
On my laptop, I was on the internet. We had a slow connection, so I couldn’t really go on YouTube. As any curious teen might do, I ended up on Wikipedia.
I stumbled across the ‘applied mathematics’ section. I stumbled across all the things you could describe with the most insane looking equations. You could model stars, people, the universe, electrons, particles, plane engines and more with applied math. Knowing it felt like the key to the code of how the world was designed. It was power.
There was one topic in particular that I couldn’t get out of my head. And that was fluid dynamics. I learned that fluids are modelled by equations called the Navier-Stokes equations. It was crazy to me that we have an equation that can describe a chaotic waterfall, whilst also describing viscous oil in the ground. The complexity and austere aesthetic drew me in like a bear to honey.
There were still unsolved problems about the Navier-Stokes equations and its properties. I was talking about it to friends, at night, on a beach in Penang. And this random dude interrupts me and says ‘hey! We still haven’t solved those yet!’. Fun fact - a decade later, this guy ended up becoming one of my best friends.
And that was the moment I thought ‘wow, mathematics is beautiful - there’s nothing else I want to learn right now’.
Four years after that, I found myself almost having an anxiety attack.
I was in a stuffy, grey lecture room in Cambridge, England. The air was chalky from the blackboard. I had an impenetrable sheet of exam questions for my finals, laying in front of me on a cramped table.
I had three hours to work through six applied mathematics questions in one of the world’s toughest theory exams. My heart was racing. The seat I was on felt cramped. I really needed to take a dump, but I didn’t want to use up the time.
My eyes settled on question three, which was a problem on solving the Navier Stokes equations given some boundary conditions. It looked fucking hard, and I didn’t really know where to start. But I slogged through it anyways. I got myself to try and remember the exact equations and all the techniques I used to solve similar questions before.
A month after that exam, I found out I somehow managed to scrape a ‘First’, a decent grade. I felt happy, but that isn’t the point of this essay.
You see, my happiest memory dealing with the theory of fluids wasn’t grinding for three years in university. It wasn’t learning about obtuse properties of differential equations. Not at all.
My happiest memory on fluids happened last month, almost six years later after that fateful exam.
Last month, my sink got clogged. It happened for the first time since I bought my house. I tried experimenting with a bunch of stuff. Baking soda and vinegar. Trying to scrape out the oil. Unscrewing the pipes. Eventually I went and managed to find a plunger from the hardware store, which finally worked after five hours of thinking until 1am. And having solved that problem, I realised that nothing ever felt so satisfying as seeing the old filthy water slowly drain from my sink.
Getting good marks on my fluids exams wasn’t this satisfying. My sense of accomplishment back then, paled in comparison to fixing my sink.
But why is that? And this got me thinking.
In that moment, I ‘lived’ the theory of fluids. I was satisfied, because I applied it to solve a real problem with stakes, with real consequences. Something that, if I did not solve, I’d have to suffer with.
And unlike Cambridge, or Navier-Stokes, I didn’t go out ‘seeking’ this problem. My clogged sink came to me. It was different from that beautiful problem I saw on my Wikipedia page when I was fifteen, which begged me to go to England so I could learn more theory to maybe have a stab at them.
You see, professors in shirts and tweeds teaching the mathematical theory of fluids to us don’t ‘live out’ their knowledge. Rather, it’s the plumbers that do that. They ‘feel’ Navier-Stokes as if its second nature. They intuitively understand fluid flows. It’s the electricians who ‘live’ the theory of electromagnetism, and Kirchoff’s laws. They do not seek new problems to solve - the problems come to them, and they have to adapt no matter what.
And to me, its these problems I’ve come to love even more than theory. It’s the practical problems with high stakes that force me to think beyond just what is aesthetic or beautiful. And dare I say, I learn better by doing these problems, because the satisfaction is like candy to me, and I never forget it. And I guarantee you I’ve forgotten almost everything from university.
And that’s why I’ve begun to study more biology and chemistry. In chemistry, I’m forced to use what I’ve learnt in quantum theory in practical ways. I am forced to ‘live out’ my theory, in a nuts and bolts way like how a car mechanic might fix an engine with their bare hands.
It’s also why I focus more on problems that are small, practical, but reward me with real comfort. I’m no longer the big thinker, ambitious type that I was when I was younger. I take problems day by day, fixing something with tangible reward, or something that leads to feedback.
If I can’t fix the practical problems right in front of me, how the hell am I going to solve the world’s hunger problem?