Published on 12, July, 2020
I don't know what to expect here. My husband is autistic, he was diagnosed in his early 20's before we met. He is now 35, he is a secondary school maths teacher.
I would like to find other people who have had similar experiences to him if possible. The difficulty he has is that he finds extremely complex maths and science (up to and including PHD level) easy but has no one to discuss these things with, as people we know and people he works with don't understand things on the same level as him.
He doesn't really have any of his own friends, but will tolerate some of mine sometimes. Generally he finds other people boring. But he also sometimes expresses feeling lonely or isolated. He finds social situations very stressful, and will avoid them where possible. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
I consider my background to be what I call "Computer Systems Engineering", which I categorise as being the hardware and software infrastructure bits that make computer systems usable for other applications. So as well as the hardware and the networks that connect them also things like the operating systems, compilers/interpreters, databases etc. In a lot of respects I find "applications" somewhat boring as it's the computer bits I'm interested in rather than the applications per-se. I'm not saying that the applications are uninteresting or a waste of time or anything, I appreciate that it's actually applications that sell computer systems, but I'm happy for other people to cover that area and I don't necessarily feel the need to do that myself. I wouldn't consider myself an expert or specialist in any area of computing but I'm a very strong generalist and I can usually overtake the knowledge of "norms" in any particular area quite quickly (which is a bit of a blessing and a curse...) The "norms" consider me to be "overly academic" though... I don't think the same way they do and on the whole they don't seem to be interested in learning my way of thinking. My way of thinking works quite well for me though. They seem to be a lot more haphazard and I think they could learn something from my way of thinking but they'd rather blunder around and try and do things randomly than sit down and do a bit of work upfront. Me, I'd rather "train hard, fight easy..." I like to think of myself as "constructively lazy" - I like working on things that save me having to do work in the future.
My education was somewhat hit and miss but despite that I eventually ended up with a 1st class degree in Computer Science where I was second in my year at my college at the UoL. (In the interests of full-disclosure Computers had been my special interest since about the age of 12 and I'd already done three years of a five-year part time degree in Electronics Engineering, so by the time I got to University full-time I already have a good grasp of large chunks of the syllabus so doing well was quite achievable.)
After my (batchelor's) degree I started working on a PhD in compiler theory working four days a week with a day release. I found though that didn't really work for me since I found I needed longer blocks of time to work on my PhD stuff and it meant I had little free time. Also I had parental pressure "to get a job" so I stopped doing the PhD and went to work full time. In retrospect that was probably a bad choice and things may well have worked out better for me if I'd found a way to do the PhD full-time. I think though I made the best decision I could at the time with the information I had available then.
I have been an MBCS, and I expect I could get Chartered status, but in IT there isn't a particular professional requirement for it unlike Civil/Mechanical/Electrical engineering where I first started work. I find at age 47 I'm going off my IT career because I find the social aspect of what I have to do drains me and causes problems on a fairly repeatable basis (mostly bouts of depression/stress/anxiety). This was what finally led to me getting my ASD diagnosis at age 46 last year. I find that the technical problems are not really the difficult bits in IT, it's the people issues that are actually usually the real problem and those one the ones that are most difficult to actually do anything about. So I've begun looking at trying to change what I do to something that would suit me better.
These days I'm trying to think of myself more as an applied mathematician and I'm trying to work towards really bringing my maths skills up to a high level and filling in the gaps in my maths knowledge that resulted from my haphazard education - missing a lot of time plus changing schools several times is not good for mathematical development! I'd like to become more of a mathematician and less of a computer person. In particular, the area I've become interested in is developing ways of teaching mathematics from the beginning to an adult audience that is more in the style of mathematics as known by professional mathematicians and less of the way it is currently developed in schools. So for example:
* we try and show how the currently accepted mathematical ideas developed over time and what problems led to their development,
* concepts have clear definitions that can be used for reasoning,
* as much as possible theorems are given current development level appropriate proofs,
* we explain not just how to use algorithms, but why they are interesting, how/why they work, and how they relate to mathematics now, how you're most likely to use them in practice. For example, you're very unlikely to be using the full-blown addition, subtraction, long multiplication and long division algorithms on a regular basis to get exact answers for real-life numbers - you'd just use a computer or a calculator. But they're still useful for "back of the envelope" calculations to get quick rough estimates with simpler numbers so you know that the answer your calculator or computer is giving you isn't completely implausible.
I too have a similar problem to your husband in that I like talking about/discussing things that I find interesting, but I've found finding people who share similar interests and can have and are interested in having sensible discussions about them difficult.
It sounds though as if your husband and Plastic and possibly others may have similar interests and we can probably have some good "nerdy" discussions. I live in Windsor but I don't mind reasonable travel for meetups - possibly somewhere central to all of us. Also, maybe there are more people on the forum who have similar interests as well and we can see if we can setup a social group?
I've also been halfheartedly looking for collaborators/discussion people for my maths education ideas so if anybody else is interested in that area I'd be happy to get into discussions in those areas too.
My wife directed me to this post as, what you have written, is an almost exact carbon copy of myself! About the only difference is that I am thinking about studying law rather than maths