Maria Mannone interviewed John Baez for her blog, Math is in the air. His words will really inspire a lot of students.
John Baez:
It seems only certain people are drawn to mathematics, and that’s fine: there are many wonderful things in life and there’s no need for everyone explore all of them. Mathematics seems to attract people who enjoy patterns, who enjoy precision, and who don’t want to remember lists of arbitrary facts, like the names of all 206 bones in the human body. In math everything has a reason and you can understand it, so you don’t really need to remember much. At first it may seem like there’s a lot to remember - for examples, lists of trig identities. But as you go deeper into math, and understand more, everything becomes simpler. These days I don’t bother to remember more than a couple of trigonometric identities; if I ever need them I can figure them out.
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But the really surprising thing is that as you go deeper and deeper into mathematics, it keeps revealing more beauty, and more mysteries. You enter new worlds full of profound questions that are quite hard to explain to nonmathematicians. As the Fields medalist Maryam Mirzakhani said, “The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers.”