I met him in an Italian restaurant in New Jersey. I was surprised to see a mathematician who looked much more like a mat

It is a not well-known fact that mathematics can also be learned by playing –just watch the private correspondence, discussions and pranks of the members of the august Bourbaki circle. Some of us (and it includes this author) do not perform well on tasks via “cold” approaches, unable to muster the motivation to do boring things. But, somehow we upregulate when stimulated or when there is play (or money) involved. This may disturb many people married to cookie-cutter pedagogical methods that require things to be drab, boring, and bureaucratic for them to be effective –but that’s reality.

When I quit the gym, I knew I wouldn’t be on a flight to Atlanta in 1996. But it made me more determined to succeed in other areas. I went back to my studies with a renewed vigor and took on the certification exams with greater purpose and focus. I failed to make the grade as a boxer, but I would not be completely drained of every ambition; I managed to transfer my passion.

I, for myself, started almost every day with a puzzle, with the excitement of unpredictability, as it took from 5 minutes to 4 hours to complete –and it was usually impossible to tell from the outset. For a couple of years, it was the first thing I looked at with the morning coffee. There was some mild competition, mild enough to be entertaining but not too intense to resemble an academic rat race. Once someone got a proof, we had to look for another approach so it paid to wake up early and beat those with a time zone advantage.

How do you learn a language? There are two routes; the first is to memorize imperfect verbs, grammatical rules, future vs. past tenses, recite boring context-free sentences, and pass an exam. The second approach consists in going to a bar, struggling a little bit and, out of the need to blend-in and integrate with a fun group of people, then suddenly find yourself able to communicate. In other words, by playing, by being alive as a human being. I personally have never seen anyone learn to speak a language properly by the first route. Also, I have never seen anyone fail to do so by the second one.

While chasing my Olympic dreams, I lost sight of my immediate goal of completing high school and going to college someday. When I quit the gym, I became more engaged at school, played soccer again, and had a memorable final year at high school. While being a teen boxing sensation would have been great, failure helped me salvage the rest of everyday teen life.

Failure pulled the rug from under my feet, but it also allowed me to gather the ruins and build a new structure for my life. Nothing tests a man’s courage, integrity, and faith like a failure. It built my psychological muscles and affected how I approached the next vision. My tenacity proved valuable in subsequent years — I’ve become a chartered accountant in multiple jurisdictions.

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nd historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson was that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Today, we know that principle as Parkinson’s law. So, if you have two weeks to write a paper for school, it will take two weeks. If you block off all day Sunday to clean your house, it will take all day. If you give something unlimited time, it will take forever. When we’re pressed by a deadline, we don’t procrastinate.

Would I have found success in the professional ranks, like ’96 Atlanta medalists Wladimir Klitschko and Floyd Mayweather? Or would I have joined the long list of Olympians who never made any headlines after their Olympic triumphs?

I still take chances with failure. I even dare to try and to dream. I do this knowing that the only way to succeed or fail is to try to do something. I can’t afford to be neutral to both success and failure.

I still take chances with failure. I even dare to try and to dream. I do this knowing that the only way to succeed or fail is to try to do something. I can’t afford to be neutral to both success and failure.

I cannot say if my life would have been better as a boxer or not. Perhaps I would have gone on to win a world title. Maybe I would have ended up undecorated after strings of defeats.

It is thanks to Maestro Alexander B. that numerous people have learned mathematics by the second route, by playing, just for the sake of entertainment. He helped many to make it their hobby. His mathematical website cut-the-knot has trained a generation –many seemingly approached the problem as hobbyists then got stuck with it. For, if you liked mathematics just a little bit, Maestro Bogomolny made it impossible for you to not love it. Mathematics was turned into a frolic.

In my relentless pursuit of boxing glory, I ignored important relationships. When failure hit, I had an opportunity to revisit and refresh critical personal connections. I wrote letters to family members and old friends and spent time with those nearby. Some of those connections formed the building blocks for the next phase of my life.

Social media brings out the best and the worst in people. He was rigorous yet open-minded, allowing people like me (who did some mathematical economics and finance) to cheat with inequalities by using the various canned methods for finding minima and maxima. He even tolerated computerized mathematics, provided of course there was some rigor in the process. I initially knew nothing about him but could observe rare attributes: an extraordinary amount of patience and a remarkable sense of humor. One summer, as he was in Israel, I informed him that I was vacationing in Lebanon. His answer: “Walking distance”. He always had a short comment that makes you smile, not laugh, which is a social art.

In the two years since he left us there has been no Saturday morning –104 of them –that I did not solve a riddle randomly selected on the web in his memory. But, without him, it is not the same.