I haven’t published a lot in my life, not to mention in mathematics. It has once been my passion to become a writer of sorts, and that dream silently faded away amongst a ton of other dreams. However, it is forever memorable to me when my first publication in mathematics happened – when I was in the seventh grade, second year into the middle school.
Ever since I was small, I’ve been led by my father to habitually learn and think on my own. He encouraged me taking my interests as far as I’d like, on whichever subjects. One of the very first things he told me was, “Curiosity is the best teacher.” – The true meaning of this saying had stayed with me since then.
Before seventh grade, I’d grown curious about mathematics, and had been indulging in the fun of mathematical discovery for a while. I taught myself algebra by going through textbooks, and the incident happened not long after that. One day I was going through the derivation of 
I was so excited that I told this discovery to my father soon after. He said:”Why don’t you write it down, as thoroughly and convincingly as possible?” I took this very interesting and exciting challenge happily, and went through pains to explain the logic of the derivation of this formula to the best of my abilities. Needless to say, bearing little idea about proper mathematical terminologies, not even hearing about the thing called “mathematical deduction” – which came to me only one year later as a huge realization – my writing at that time was silly and clumsy. I was like a child who just learned how to run shortly after learning how to walk. The fun was beyond everything.
After I was done, my father seemed delighted. To him, the joy is about watching his kid learning how to run on her own shortly after she just learned how to walk, I guess?
Weeks after that, when I had already forgotten about this, my father came home one day saying:”V, your article is published!” – He submitted my silly writing to a magazine called “Mathematics for Middle School Students” and it got accepted! Hence, my first publication in mathematics.
Truth is, my father is the best educator in the world. There’s simply no doubt about that.
Data Miner 