Including today, there are 17 days until the first Saturday of Winter Break, 27 days until Christmas, 33 days until New Years, 150 days until the end of the winter semester and two days until the weekend.

It is all about numbers. We have countdowns and we assign numbers to days, payments and measurements. Each and every one of the 24,654 students attending Grand Valley State University this semester use numbers in one way or another, usually on a daily basis. GVSU has more then 200 areas of study, 82 undergraduate degrees and 356 student organizations.

Every number mentioned above combined is 25,521. But math means nothing when numbers are simply numbers with no purpose. If there are seven Golden retriever puppies roaming the campus (I wish), the number seven only means something because we say seven of whatever we’re counting.

If you can’t tell already, I’m a huge math nerd. Calculus is anything but torture, and I would consider math as an extracurricular. Before you go condemning my headgear philosophy, just think for a minute about how many things that you count.

Waking up in the middle of the night, quickly calculating how many hours of sleep you would get if you fall asleep in the next minute. Or how many hours you slept in your past 8 a.m. class. The rent that you owe for the month, or how many people you need to buy Christmas gifts for – maybe the amount of credits that it would take to become a mathematics major.

Although numbers do not pop up out of the ground or float around our heads like in “Ocean’s 13,” they can be created by anything in sight, which to a math nerd like myself, is pretty spectacular.
“Numbers” is a show, numbers are labels, you can have numbers served up in any way you want them: natural, rational, real or complex and apparently it is also a night club in San Diego.

I think the reason why most math lovers find numbers so appealing is because they bring about not only organization, but also hope. Organization is an obvious idea, seeing as the reason people number things in the first place is to keep things in order. But hope? Well, haven’t you ever had a favorite or lucky number? And the whole point of a countdown is to lead to the numero uno, the big answer, the first in line, and is most often the most important.

Not only do numbers change meaning and provide detail, but they have the potential to be optimistic as well as down-right depressing: according to the American Cancer Society, approximately 562,000 Americans are expected to die of cancer. However, about 11.1 million Americans are cancer survivors. Choosing what to see, there can be so many ways to come to a specific conclusion; for instance, the only way to get to the number eight is not 4 4. Picking and choosing what we see is nothing new.

As for me, I’m going to skip happily along with my calculator in hand, counting the days until summer.
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