What did I learn? Among other things, that, despite mathematics being the most explicit artifact that civilization has produced, it has also provoked many speculations that are not capable of being settled. I am done doing mathematics, so far as I was able to, but the thinking about it and the questions it raises are ongoing. While it was humbling to be made aware that what I know is nothing compared with what I don’t know, this was also enlivening for me. One channel involved trying to learn algebra, geometry, and calculus, and the other channel involved the things they introduced me to and led me to think about. I know you.”Īfter a time, my studies began to occupy two channels. ![]() You failed the first time, and you will fail this time, too. When I would hit the shoals, I would hear a voice saying, “There is no point to this. I was returning to childhood not to recover something but to try to do things differently from the way I had done them, to try to do better and see where that led. It had always seemed less a subject than a destination, a private place where the bright girls and boys shared secrets.įor two years, I spent my days studying things that children study. ![]() I passed algebra and geometry in high school by cheating, which is not a good life lesson for an adolescent, but I had never taken calculus. ![]() As a boy, I had been kicked off the math train at the algebra station, so I decided to start there and then learn geometry and calculus-three of the disciplines that the eighteenth century called pure mathematics. Hoping to make myself smarter and then write a book about it, I began studying mathematics when I was sixty-five, which was five years ago.
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