Nerdy Quality Time with My 14-Year-Old Son

The start of the school year has had a very positive influence on at least one of my sons who, taking geometry this year, has had some of his math-oriented gears put into motion.

During dinner this evening, he was telling me his ideas (algorithms) for generating prime numbers. He would describe his scheme and then, feeling (and acting) like he had just sent a tremendous pearl in our direction, wait for his mother and me to shoot holes in it. We did this rather easily at first (finding counter examples to assail his hypotheses), but he analyzed, adapted, and started generating more and more complex schemes. Finally, they got too complex for us to do the math in our heads.

So, after dinner, he and I started programming a test bench in Java to explore and test his prime-number-generating schemes. We started with a very simple scheme, but then graduated through 5 or 6 increasingly more complex schemes, seeing which of the first 100 instances of each scheme were primes. Some of the results were surprising. He got really fired-up about this, wanting to have us try “one more thing”. We finally had to get stern with him and send him to bed as it was well past his bed time. Who knows -- we may have the basis of a science fair project, and one in mathematics and/or computer science would stand out from the others.

Stepping back, I regard this as some really nice “quality time” spent with this son. It’s not quite the same as playing catch in the backyard, working on a pinewood derby car, or any of the million or so other (more traditional) ways for a father and son to spend time together. In fact, this one was down-right nerdy (with all that math). But it was a really nice connection. I beam with pride, recognizing that he has inherited some of my inclination towards the sciences.

Now, if we can just get him to do his homework....