How I went from "Fail" to "Congratulations!" in about 30 hours

I was literally in the middle of studying for FM yesterday morning when suddenly a text came in on my phone.

“Hello candidate the result of your FM exam is Fail.”

My gut reaction? “What the? Is this a prank?” Only minutes prior I was in conversation with a few coworkers about their experiences with FM and I thought maybe one of them found my phone number somehow and texted me this crazy depressing text. But no! On April 20 I took FM for the first time and on June 7—the day before taking FM again—the SOA decided to inform me of my failure to pass. (Did you read that? “Fail.” Was the capital “F” really necessary?) What a downer. But really, it was so hilarious I went out to my coworkers and showed them the text and we all had a good laugh about it.

Oh, by the way. I passed FM today!

I had it all planned out. I was going to get up, get ready, and drive to the testing center way earlier than 1:00 pm, the appointment time. But as my morning progressed I realized this was prime time to review a practice exam from yesterday and to refresh on a few of the hazier subjects.

I left around 11:15, I think, and got lost. Hold on, that sounds bad. It really wasn’t. I got lost in the sense that I found the right road and drove too far and had Karen help me retrace my steps a bit. After check-in, I ended up starting the exam at about 12:30.

The first half hour was kind of a rush. Problems one and two were lowballs, and then I hit a few medium ones and it kind of continued that way. After that half hour I realized there was nothing to worry about. I was already off to a good start, managing my time well, and things looked familiar. For the remaining two and a half hours, then, I felt cool and calm. (It was also kind of cold in there and I started to ball up in the last half hour.) By the time I selected an answer for question #35, I had little more than seven minutes to spare. I reviewed a few problems I marked and actually changed the answer on one.

Two quotes kept coming back to me throughout the exam. One is from Paul Harmon, my boss.

“It’s better to spend 30 seconds guessing on a question you can come back to than to spend 14 minutes on a question only to realize you’re going to need to guess anyway.”

The second is one of the last things McKay said to me before going to bed last night.

“Don’t spend too much time on any one problem. Just get through it all and mark the ones you want to come back to and then you can go back and spend time on some of them.”

Best advice I could have received, same thing from both of them. It really saved my tail, too. I was able to relax because I answered the ones I knew how to answer and I let the other ones be. Of course, when it finished the computer prompted me to answer a survey about my testing experience, but by then my heart pounded and raced. I answered their questions quickly and without much thought. (Seriously, Prometric? You want me to answer your survey right before I see my test results? Puh-leez.) And then I saw the wonderful word...

“Congratulations!”

They gave me a printout when I left the room. It’s really beautiful if you read it slowly and imagine you just studied for hundreds of hours.

“Congratulations! A preliminary analysis of your test results shows that you were successful in achieving the passing score established by the SOA/CAS/CIA for Exam FM/2 (Financial Mathematics).”

Onward and upward.

The first book I've read in a long while

I just finished reading Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh and it is a fantastic book. For those who don't know (most of the world), Pierre de Fermat was an amateur mathematician of the seventeenth century who wrote the famous (to a small portion of the world) line on the page of a book, "I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain." He claimed to have a proof of a great mathematical problem, but no one has ever discovered what that proof was. For 350 years, mathematicians around the world tried to recreate a proof of Fermat's "last theorem," as it was called, and failed. But in 1994, Andrew Wiles wrote a 130 page proof, thus solving the world's greatest mathematical problem.

That synopsis is not what sucked me into this book. No, what got me was the incredible history of the world's greatest mathematical problem (dating all the way back to Pythagoras) and the simplicity of the problem itself. Singh, the author, points out that it is so simple that a child can understand it but so difficult to prove that it took 350 years to finally pin it down. This book is absolutely loaded with some of the greatest true stories I have ever read.

It's been a long time since I read a book for pleasure, cover to cover. I usually have my nose in a textbook. But really, Fermat's Enigma was beautiful from start to finish and very difficult to put down. Here is one of many great quotes from the book, this one from Ian Stewart:

"An astronomer, a physicist, and a mathematician (it is said) were holidaying in Scotland. Glancing from a train window, they observed a black sheep in the middle of a field. 'How interesting,' observed the astronomer, 'all Scottish sheep are black!' To which the physicist responded, 'No, no! Some Scottish sheep are black!' The mathematician gazed heavenward in supplication, and then intoned, 'In Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black.'"

And here's a limerick someone wrote in celebration of Wiles's proof, as quoted from Singh's book:

"My butter, garçon, is writ large in!"
A diner was heard to be chargin',
"I had to write there,"
Exclaimed waiter Pierre,
"I couldn't find room in the margarine."

If you're not a mathematician, don't let that keep you from reading this book. It's not written for mathematicians. And if you're thinking of reading it, just do so.

Are you a subhuman?

My differential equations class is going really well, as is my calculus class. If I could have read that sentence at the start of the semester, that would have greatly relieved some initial anxiety. I churned out a 98.5% on my midterm last week for differential equations and I'm coming up on my second midterm for calculus (next Tuesday). And since this chapter of calculus feels much easier than the first chapter, I suspect I will do well (with some really focused studying, of course). For now, here are two quotes my instructor included in our differential equations syllabus at the start of the semester, which are just plain awesome:

"It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used." — GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ (mathematician, philosopher)

"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house." — ROBERT HEINLEIN (author), Time Enough for Love

What I learned this weekend

Elder Lynn L. Summerhays, an Area Seventy, visited our stake for stake conference this weekend. The priesthood leadership meeting was Sunday morning, during which Elder Summerhays quoted something interesting. He said that during a recent private training he attended, Elder Neil L. Andersen said, “One of the signs of true conversion is how a man treats his wife.” I like that. It’s a statement that makes me quickly evaluate my own life and want to be a better person.