Link to video on Vimeo »
I was obsessed in kindergarten with trying to draw a perfect circle freehand. Then one day I found a snail cemetery behind our old thatched house in the village I grew up in. Who knows how all those shells got there. Some shells were broken, and showed their fascinating structure spiraling inward. I had a feeling, that these spirals were circles too, but with a constantly changing curvature. Spirals became my newfound love that day, and I had an epiphany that they will mean even more to me one day.
Every first-grader should be shown this video, and they would love math from that day on. This is how childishly and purely we mathematicians feel about math. One becomes a mathematician when this same feeling springs from one's imagination instead of pictures.
