maths . . .

For some reason, I've never liked maths. Never. In fact, the last time I had a course in maths was my junior year of high school. I refreshed myself for the GRE, but did so very unwillingly. Most of the time I feel that I would rather have my wisdom teeth pulled again than do maths. One of the reasons I'm in the humanities is because I can't do equations and algorithms or what not . . . and most importantly, it's not required that I do any sort of math . . .

Yet, my research future has apparently decided that it is imperative that I pick up a bit of advanced math in order to do statistics and a bit of computer science and programming (for linguistics research, corpus linguistics, natural language processing, etc.) . . . my high school teacher is probably giggling evilly (how one can giggle evilly, I'm not too sure . . . ).
EDIT: Check out Duane's post on the importance of statistics in everyday life. Please also note my comment there . . . I suppose it's not clear here that I think maths are important . . . it's merely an area that I've chosen to avoid till now to save myself the migraines of a discipline I, frankly, don't understand and often don't like.

Of course, complicated equations and algorithms are nothing new. Mathematical tablets look about as foreign to a cuneiformist as calculus does to the average English reader. So, again, math comes back into my research as a part of the advanced scribal curriculum.

If maths are your thing, check out Eleanor Robson's (one of the if not the foremost scholar on Mesopotamian mathematics) faculty page where she has several articles available for download.