BENGALURU: On the birthday of his 13-year-old niece, Vikas Goyal did some simple math with her birthdate, thereby changing the young girl’s perception of the subject. When the Senior Manager - Business Analytics at indiamart.com, tried to convince her that math is interesting, she asked him to prove it. “We took her birthdate, January 24, as an example. We wrote down 24/01 and then added it up (2+4+0+1=7). The square of 7 is 49 and the square of 49 is 2401. ‘Amazing! Thanks for making my birthdate special!,’ she said,” Goyal says, adding that there’s a fear of numbers that most people harbour.
For many, math is a dull and dry subject with lots of formulae, a perception he hopes to change with his book, A Date with Numbers, which simplifies math based on the 365 days of the year. “The purpose of the book is to bring out the beauty of numbers by linking it to dates and make math an interesting subject. Dates are special, and they are universal; birthdays, marriage anniversary, work anniversary or even the paycheck day - dates are meaningful to us,” says Goyal, who has worked with T.I.M.E, Career Launcher and Endeavor Careers as a part-time quantitative and logical reasoning faculty during his academic days.
His love for numbers started by accident. When he lost his father at the age of 12, he started teaching maths to support his family. “Gradually, the responsibility changed towards a love for the subject and I started teaching CAT/GMAT students during my academic days. Post my PGDM too, I continued studying math/statistics by doing various certification courses in lean six sigma and data analytics,” says Goyal, who wrote the book in 15 months. “The experience of teaching especially quantitative aptitude and logical reasoning to CAT/GMAT students helped me tremendously to come up with equations,” he says.
Writing a book wherein you need to identify something unique for each date was a hurculean task. “In addition, it became tougher having a full-time day job. But I believe that there is no ‘i’ in ‘team’ but there is always ‘i’ in ‘time’. If you are passionate about something, shelling 7 hours out of 168 hours in a week is just 4.16%,” he says.