Maria Kreyn, Math Musings

Math to me has always been a retreat, of sorts, into a perception of this world seemingly completely divorced from it. It is pure abstraction in what seems like a vacuum. Physics explains the tangible. It allows us to understand how we may move from point A to point B. The problems mathematics invents doesn’t bother with these things. In fact, it could more easily prove that we cannot move at all. But mathematics will disguise itself in practical application. Integrals will allow Maxwell to indirectly define the static speed of light. But at some point I see it take off the ground. Slowly it sheds the things that bind it to the tangible. Numbers are no longer used to count oranges or apples, and even when they are used to measure plots of land, those measurements produce numbers that cannot actually exist. The universe is a huge approximation, then, a limit. At some point, math ceases to represent a reflection of life as perceived by our senses. It in a way transcends them…and therein lies my envy to those that possess a real talent for the discipline. I imagine it is much like a sixth sense. And if so, then it is a means of widening the spectrum of ones perception of existence. It is a way to bend your mind into a particular pattern of thought (much like anything else one focuses on learning). But a bit better, because it seems to bend the mind a bit farther. I do not see any other discipline (at least academic) that will produce such profound abstraction. It is a practice in versatility for the mind. It is a game.

But towards math I experience quite a bit of ambivalence: there is contradiction and dichotomy in my perception of it. The farther it moves away from direct application, the more cold it may get, and the more unwelcoming. At some point it no longer humors the attempts of those, like me, who want to understand it light-heartedly and with no purpose other than to run around in a mental n-dimensional playground.

I would like to be able to draw an analogy between math and art, since in art there is also an inherent dichotomy, inherent contradiction, tension, resolution. It at once surpasses and transcends this world in its representation of it. What I have read about math outside of class has been so abstract, and yet at the same time it seems to deal with the patterns in the universe around us. Like in art, there is a hierarchical structure (or so it seems). There are certain mental prerequisites. There are certain aesthetic values. And there is a difference between the artist and the aesthete, in the same way that there is a difference between the silly student (me) and the mathematician. Though privy to the simplicity and beauty of an elegant, minimal proof, I most likely cannot create it. The aesthete merely watches and comments. The artist thinks and creates. But math is colder. As much as it is said that one relies heavily on intuition, the rules and rigidity and rigor are sometimes overwhelming. The rigor of math is certainly very different from the rigor in art. The more I examine both, the more my intuition leads me to believe that they are the antitheses of each other. Nevertheless, I envy that sixth sense in mathematics. For me to get a taste of it, even a primitive sense of the patterns and the nature of thought in math is interesting, even if my understanding is not as deep as a mathematicians. I can compensate in a similar way, but at the other end of perception—at the artistic one. Perception is often based on contrasting information, and thinking on analogy. So as for math, I am intrigued, but cautious.