When I turned 27 this year I sent out an e-mail to all my nearby friends inviting them to my birthday party. The invitation said I was turning 3 ^ 3. Unfortunately the ^ character got screwed up and nowadays none of my friends are math people. The end result was that I got birthday cards congratulating me on turning 33.

In the weeks leading up to my birthday, in fact pretty much the whole year before I turned 27 I made a big deal of the 3 x 3 x 3 wholeness and goodness of my upcoming age. Those x ^ x number only come around three times in the human life span. 3 x 3 x 3 is the last stop before a long desert trek. No human has ever made it to the age of 4 ^ 4.

The years I spent as a computer science major attuned me to the beauty of numbers. Numbers develop a resonance when you spend enough time with them. Part of it was all those problem sets we did in school. There's a sense of accomplishment that comes from solving a problem and getting a nice whole number like 3^3 at the end.

So now that I'm a 'sociologist-in-training' I miss my secret world of numbers once in a while. One of my moments of glory when I was in Ghana last year took place during a quiz night at a local expat bar. As a tie breaker four team representatives (including me) went to the front and had to solve a number series. The other guys (and they were all guys) were quick draws, yelling out wrong numbers within a few seconds of starting. Meanwhile in my brain the numbers were forming a soup, then suddenly they were forming a pattern. I yelled out a number, it was correct, and I won my team a round of tequila. Sometimes I miss tokenism, the sense of being something rare and unique, a female math geek. Female sociologists are a dime a dozen.

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