More than Infatuation

Math has always been one of my great loves. Not my only great love, of course, and certainly not that which I love the most, but it ranks pretty high on the list. The way numbers can be juggled and moved, how starting from a very simple base one can build huge impressive structures, and how Fermat didn't have quite enough room left to finish off his proof.

With this love of math, my view of the world is changed. Sometimes I see things as sets, sometimes I find myself counting (sometimes in binary), occasionally I wonder about the number of M&Ms in a jar, and find myself trying to integrate over the jar in different ways to find the best approximation. Then there're the times that I find myself proving the obvious, simply so that I know it's something that, given my axioms, I can know to be true. This also, of course, explains my love for physics.. physics is obviously just math, but less theoretical.

And as my view of the world is changed, I find that I sometimes have trouble understanding other people. I don't know how they can't see what I find to be obvious, I'm not sure where our understandings differ. Perhaps they never had that third-grade teacher that had puzzles and games instead of book exercises. Perhaps they never saw that math could help them win party and carnival games, so opted instead to focus their efforts on poetry and wine.

Perhaps they're simply not me. Perhaps we're all different, we each have our own unique gifts and character flaws. Perhaps I should have taken more psychology classes in college, but they didn't generally have enough math. And perhaps I'll consider mathematical aptitude to be my superpower. It and EMP generation, what more could a guy ask for? Well, those, and the real, true love of his life.

So with those goals accomplished, I can start spending more time wondering... how exactly /do/ you decrypt PGP without the key? And why /does/ a vase just want to keep doing whatever it is it's doing?