I'm a life-long math nerd. I'm also a rather defiant, strong-willed, autistic girl.

I have a lot of stories about people undermining and attacking me, but this is one of the rare times when someone demonstrated for me what it means to truly support someone else. It involves one of my math teachers.

There was a lesson, at one point, which briefly mentioned a few "seemingly impossible constructions" that had stymied ancient Greek mathematicians. It was all of a single paragraph in the textbook, and the teacher said maybe two sentences about it.

So of course, me being me, I decided to attempt one of these allegedly impossible tasks.

A few days later, I thought I had something promising. I took it up to his desk after class, walked him through what I'd done, and asked for his input. He carefully read over my notes, and then looked up at me, and nailed me with a stare I'll never forget, and said:

"You will be famous. ...if this works."

Of course, it didn't work. A day or two later, he handed me back my notes, along with three carefully detailed counter-examples proving my technique was flawed in certain cases.

And only after all that, he told me that the construction I'd attempted had long since been proven to be impossible, but that a minor adjustment to the rules made it easily doable, with an approach not terribly different from my own.

That man knew, for a fact, that I had already failed, before I ever even came to his desk - and yet he chose to approach my attempt as if it had every possibility of success, and was there to help me shake it off when I inevitably smacked into a brick wall.

I think about him a lot when I think about the kind of mentor and supporter I want to be.