I don't know if it was specifically related to anything, but I always did well in math at school. HiccupHaddock put it well earlier in the thread - there's a satisfying clarity to math which means that as long as the question is clear, there is only one answer (or a set or class of answers which themselves can be described mathematically). With more art-aligned subjects, answers and marks can be extremely subjective. With math, it's a lot harder for a teacher or other authority figure to tell you that you're wrong when your answer is right (although I did have run-ins with teachers who wanted me to 'show my work' when I skipped directly to the answer because, to me, it was glaringly obvious).
Even outside textbook math, I've tended to have patterns leap out at me. I notice sum-of-squares triplets in the wild, sequences of factors, common trigonometry numbers outside their natural environment. Before all local supermarket shelf labels had cost-per-unit figures on them, I would do the math in my head at a glance to find out what was the best value. On my actual autism test, I was the first person in ten years to notice that the sheet set with dozens of tick-box questions and an add-it-all-up section at the back didn't actually match up, mathematically - they had one too many questions in the wrong subsection and one too few in another, making the results of their last ten years invalid. Oops. Although I did wonder, at the time, whether this was a secret test to see whether I'd pick it up or not...
24 Apr 2022, 9:00 am
