The best of two worlds

Hari Balasubramanian's essay at 3QD resonates with me. It's a beautiful, beautiful piece that brings warmth to my heart and helps me make sense of the things I currently do. Like him, I'm in a very technical field of medicine (one may of course argue that it is both science and art, but the science part takes years of formal training, and a lot of objective multiple choice exams), but I spend a lot of time with the humanities, mostly literature, during my free time.

I’ve always thought of myself as someone who is more drawn to the humanities than to math or the sciences. This can seem very puzzling to someone looks at my career details: degrees in engineering and a career in academia in a branch of applied mathematics called operations research. Even I am stumped sometimes – how did I get so deep into a quantitative field when all my life I’ve held that literature (literary fiction in particular), history and travel are far better at revealing something about the human condition than any other pursuit?

Read the essay here.

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