I have a confession to make. I graduated with a BFA from UC College Conservatory of Music with honors in 1980. Much to my chagrin, I had to re-learn how to do long division by hand after taking a Christmas job at Radio Shack. I'd just not needed it. It was very embarrassing. Mind you, I'd taken Astronomy labs where I'd had to calculate the height of craters on the moon and the transit times of stars and even calculated the rotational velocity of the rings of Saturn, (all with a fancy scientific calculator) but somehow I'd lost the ability to do 4-function math in my head. Most of my time in college had been spent learning to write novels, short stories, and movie scripts.
It has a happy ending. That was 1980. I was so backward in math that I ended up programming computers for a living. By 1987, I had been forced to teach myself Calculus to comprehend the inner workings of the Yield-to-Maturity method of bond amortization and my mutual fund company was the first to do it programmatically when other houses were still having their portfolio managers crank it out on a special bond calculator. I'd had to dissect how this calculator did its internal rounding so I could match the calculations.
So, I did recover from this lousy math deficit. My warning is: use it or lose it.
