
Why I Like Math [pdf] - Toyentrepreneur
http://www.southparkwillie.com/SPinfo/mathessayfinal1.pdf
======
themodelplumber
I like the way this is framed in terms of the comparison to a religious
experience. A few years ago I had one of those "unified model revelation"
experiences in a non-mathematical field, and based on that experience I think
I would ask the author how the follow-on learning or application went. In my
experience, the intuitive "experience of the knowledge" was much more striking
than the eventual unfolding and application of the logic in that case. However
in other cases, the intuitive experience of the revelation/knowledge was weak,
yet the model turned out to be somewhat randomly selected by others as
interesting or applicable.

I thought this was interesting--that the revelatory experience can end up
being so subjective and limited in the goes-nowhere-from-here sense, yet it
feels so darn amazing at the time. I wondered if it was similar to seeing a
Tetris happen for the first time. An emotional reward in the sense of
rewarding an organizational triumph of the mind. And seeing it with the
intuition is one of those things our mind loves to count as actually seeing it
in real life.

(I've also experienced this as a practicing religious person; in religion
though, the subjectivity can quickly become a bummer because the question of
one's worthiness or lack of discipline is nearly always up for discussion,
especially when you ask why the results were disappointing or something like
that)

~~~
username90
> In my experience, the intuitive "experience of the knowledge" was much more
> striking than the eventual unfolding and application of the logic in that
> case.

In math applications doesn't matter, just the beauty of the revelation.
Understanding how everything in math is connected is the main goal of the
field, so understanding more of it is never pointless.

But if we talk about applications then it is that if A and B are the same then
all theorems derived for A also works for B and vice versa. This is very
important since it automatically multiplies our productivity and learning
rate! One such epiphany which many falters on is that x and y doesn't matter,
they could be z or µ or whatever. Another which many struggles with but
usually overcomes is that 10 + 30 is just as easy to compute as 1 + 3.

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Wazzymandias
"Islam was out because that’s not for white people."

For someone who espouses an expertise in mathematics his perspective on
religion is quite reductive if not completely wrong in some cases. I guess in
addition to math the author is fond of strawman arguments.

~~~
pickledish
I think you might be taking this line too seriously. In this piece I don't
think the author is trying to lay out a well-thought-out, validated, and
rhetorically-correct argument for his point of view -- if he were trying to do
that, you'd be totally right and that line would have no place in it.

But in this case I think the article is pretty clearly more stream of
consciousness, just what the author believed at the time, legitimate or not --
and even though it's reductive and just genuinely a pretty bad reason, it's
also easy to see how his subconscious might be thinking along the lines of
"islam? Nah can't do islam, I'm not brown". Our minds generate totally faulty
lines of reasoning like that all the time.

(especially if he came into this with a predisposition towards Buddhism, which
I wouldn't be surprised about, since Buddhism tends to be viewed as very
"cool" to westerners but Islam not as much)

Edit: ok or it was a joke :p

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timvdalen
Was this written by _the_ Matt Stone? I only realized that at the very end,
which gives this whole thing another dimension.

Good read.

~~~
Rerarom
> Was this written by _the_ Matt Stone?

Yes.

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MockObject
The easiest way to experience a sensation of quasi-religious vastness from
math might be pondering large numbers.

> Weirdly, thinking about Graham’s number has actually made me feel a little
> bit calmer about death, because it’s a reminder that I don’t actually want
> to live forever—I do want to die at some point, because remaining conscious
> for eternity is even scarier. Yes, death comes way, way too quickly, but the
> thought “I do want to die at some point” is a very novel concept to me and
> actually makes me more relaxed than usual about our mortality.

[https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-
number.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html)

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chapliboy
It's interesting to consider that people who look for a feeling of one-ness
with the world can find it through Mathematics or through religion, even
though they are considered almost diametrically opposite approaches to
understand the Universe.

~~~
protonfish
That's not how I see it. Mathematics is not science, even though science has
found practical uses for certain types of math. Pure math does not require
observation of the real world for proof, only consistency with itself. As a
system of symbols independent of the messy real world I see it closer to
mysticism than hard science. I am not saying this as a bad thing, only
something we need to be honest about.

~~~
Koshkin
Well, one can think of, say, natural numbers as a mystical "system of symbols"
but I find them extremely close to the real world when I count change in my
pocket.

~~~
protonfish
But that's what they they were designed for. The first "numbers" were arguably
clay tokens meant to represent goods in storage
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ancient_numeral_sys...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ancient_numeral_systems#Clay_token)
Numbers were and are primarily used for accounting purposes. If they didn't
accurately represent the change in your pocket then the system would be
improved until it did. There's nothing magical about it.

~~~
Koshkin
Yet, there are people who see magic in numbers, as others tend to do in other
mathematical constructs.

~~~
protonfish
Exactly my point - that viewing magic in math is more akin to religion than
science.

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Rainymood
Can we state that math is something like religion? The search for The One
Truth? I feel oddly connected with the author and his thoughts mirror mine
almost completely, I was just not able to word them...

~~~
Koshkin
Not really. Religion is based on belief, and math is based on knowledge and
logic. (As to the arousal and other "experiences" \- that's just a
psychological side effect that has nothing to do with anything.)

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zoroaster
Conway's Game of Life on a universal scale. Entertainment for Olympus, or a
simulation to find an answer / stave off an inevitability?

The laws of physics and mathematics as the author sees them provide the
substrate that seems to imply hard determinism; chaos theoreticians revel as
the chaos of the now is reduced to causal determinism predicated on initial
conditions and the base laws of the system, all interconnected.

But why quantum uncertainty? Why does observed light exhibit particle behavior
while unobserved light exhibits wave behavior? Why does observation collapse
the waveform? Are the quantum and classical reconcilable into a theory of
everything? Einstein would hope so, but who knows what's really going on. In
the end, it seems human knowledge is still, ultimately limited, with a vague
sense of having experienced an indescribable "oneness" as the big kahuna of
the panaceas.

What if it were fractal? What if there was no "end" but just an infinite
regression with deeper and deeper questions with ever-escaping answers? An
infinite game, consuming disorder, systematizing into local order - life's
eternal war waged against entropy, helplessness, meaninglessness until ending
and recurring. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing; pure comedy, where the only thing that seems to make us feel alive is
the struggle to survive - whether through religion, philosophy, or
mathematics. Still makes for some great art along the way; life as a beauty-
generator in the void. /rant

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calibas
I'm not religious, I'm not against atheism, but I think it's unfortunate that
math and science have become so strongly associated with atheism. We tend to
forget that many of the most influential scientists and mathematicians were
mystics who had experiences similar to Matt's (Pythagoras and Newton being two
prominent examples).

Some people need these transcendent experiences or else their lives feel
empty. Nothing wrong with finding it through math or science instead of
organized religion.

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pattisapu
". . . these Magic-Eye moments single-handedly define faith for me."

A Unix fortune today gave me this great quote by German philosopher and
theologian Paul Tillich:

"Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith."

The broader paragraph, on what kinds of certitude we seek in life and the
judgments we must make upon them, is striking:

"The affirmation that Jesus is the Christ is an act of faith and consequently
of daring courage. It is not an arbitrary leap into darkness but a decision in
which elements of immediate participation and therefore certitude are mixed
with elements of strangeness and therefore incertitude and doubt. But doubt is
not the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. Therefore, there is no
faith without risk. The risk of faith is that it could affirm a wrong symbol
of ultimate concern, a symbol which does not really express ultimacy (as,
e.g., Dionysus or one’s nation). But this risk lies in quite a different
dimension from the risk of accepting uncertain historical facts. It is wrong,
therefore, to consider the risk concerning uncertain historical facts as part
of the risk of faith. The risk of faith is existential; it concerns the
totaliy of our being, while the risk of historical judgments is theoretical
and open to permanent scientific correction. Here are two different dimensions
which should never be confused. A wrong faith can destroy the meaning of one’s
life; a wrong historical judgment cannot. It is misleading, therefore, to use
the word 'risk' for both dimensions in the same sense."

Matt Stone's essay resonates here I think . . . mathematics goes beyond
historical judgments and gets to existential concerns too.

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tzokeras
That is an enviable feeling to get from Math. It's true that enlightenment may
come in many forms. Also, purpose and meaning is desperately needed even from
the most sane and rational of us. For the lucky, religion is enough source for
meaning and happiness. For others it may take a little more than that.

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playing_colours
"Mathematics for Human Flourishing" [1] is a beautiful, inspiring book on
deeply human perspective on mathematics.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Human-Flourishing-
Francis...](https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Human-Flourishing-
Francis/dp/0300237138)

------
atomack
Reminds me of this, [https://www.businessinsider.com/steven-strogatz-
interview-on...](https://www.businessinsider.com/steven-strogatz-interview-on-
math-education-2016-6?r=US&IR=T), interview with Steven Strogatz, when he gets
onto the idea (and dangers) of what beauty means in maths.

Also, this [https://plus.maths.org/content/andrew-wiles-what-does-if-
fee...](https://plus.maths.org/content/andrew-wiles-what-does-if-feel-do-
maths) from Andrew Wiles, when he mentions that maths, the actual doing of it
at least, isn't so much the cold hard logic of formal equations, that's just
how it's communicated. It's the sitting down and trying to grapple with some
mathematical ideas when it becomes more akin to musical experience.

iirc, there's a passage in Godel, Escher, Bach where Hofstadter actually works
through a mathematical calculation and compares its cadences with musical
experience. And there's the poems of Rebecca Elson (Theories of Everything,
Explaining Relativity) that do the best job, for me, of describing what is
actually appealing about maths.

Like this article, they all emphasise the joy of just sitting down and playing
with mathematical ideas. That that is where the understanding and fun really
is, though difficult to communicate directly. It's not so much the technical
bits of learning formulae and grinding results out of them that, at least when
I was at school, was all we ever really did.

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abrax3141
Lovely! Here's a different take, by a 5th grader :-)

    
    
       https://leosstemhacks.wordpress.com/2019/08/31/i-like-math-a-poem/

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prostheticvamp
This reads 95% like a personal statement for some university program - I was
very surprised to see Matt Stone’s name at the end.

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gfalcao
This essay made me think a lot of Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhikers Guide to the
Galaxy"

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shekharshan
I can see by the way you write, you have read enough Buddhist texts.

One thing I would clarify is that Buddhism, as taught by Buddha, doesn’t have
beliefs. It has hypotheses that are proved causally and tasted experiential
you during deep attention and awareness. The word used by Buddha is
“Ehipassiko”, translated as come and see for yourself.

Carry on with your journey of mathematics and I wish you all the success!

