I’m in a season of life when more of my former teachers are passing away, each loss reminding me how early mentors helped lead me to the right place. All of this came to mind recently with the news that David Busekist, who taught me high school trigonometry and so much else, had died at 73.

It's been said that the world’s newsrooms are full of failed math students — journalists who toil in the world of words because the world of numbers eluded them. I suppose I count myself in that legion.

As a scholar of arithmetic and geometry, I was dutiful but uninspired, and I signed up for trigonometry only because it was expected of me.

Gazing at the equations Mr. Busekist scribbled on the board, I was quickly lost in the fog of sines, cosines and tangents — so mystified, in fact, that I couldn’t

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