Once I discovered mathematics, I found that
that it was,
is more artistic than anything that I'd ever seen before.
It's more creative, it's more ingenious,
is more abstract and with no author, Nope,
no author. Yeah.
And it's just was just there and you could,
you could study it and it was infinitely deep.
You could pick up any part and you could just keep going and everything just fit
together so nicely and just wanted to see more and understand more.
And all the other mathematical writing that were that was on the the
blackboards,
like from the graduate classes and things like that.
I wanted to understand what they were about and they must be representatives of
some sort of world that I didn't have access to at the time.
So I'm looking into your eyes.
I'm seeing something that looks like a religious convert or maybe like Ray
Charles the first time he tried heroin or something. You got the bug.
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
I I mean it's the only thing I've thought about for about six years.
I just, you're obsessed. I just dived into it.
In fact, I don't think I had like,
like kind of this really strong mathematical ability.
I was just fascinated by it and,
and for me it didn't come as naturally as it did for my brother.
And I really had to struggle. I really had to.
I felt it was,
it was a real challenge to my self worth.
I felt like if I couldn't do this,
if I couldn't understand mathematics,
that that life was just not worth living. Whoa. It was pretty,
it was like that I just decided I would prove to myself that I could do it and
to, to the exclusion of almost everything.
Well, this, this is, I mean I'm joking around a little bit about heroin,
but it does behave like that once you find out that there is a hidden world and
that the,
this hidden world is strangely meaningful and that it's clearly too beautiful to
be constructed by any human mind.
Like the most beautiful human minds can barely understand this world,
but it's more like they're dusting off. I guess in my understanding,
I think about like the ruins of Petra and imagine that Petro were buried in sand
and you were just whisking away sand and uncovering ruins.
You be pretty convinced that you weren't offering the ruins of Petra.
You would know that you didn't build this thing, but you, yeah. You know,
it's just such privilege to be
Able to,
to touch something this beautiful that it's apparently an authored by anything
known to be human. I mean,
that's kind of my feeling of reverence and transcendence.
Yeah. Like there's this kind of
turtle stillness in this world. You know, you,
and recently I've just picked up the old math texts and
the ideas there are just as fresh as they were, you know,
30 years ago when I was studying them.
And they still have that pure beauty about them.