My background is mathematics. A master’s degree to be precise. I love maths. It’s art.

It’s good to think back about maths once in a while, even though the field of computing has hijacked my mind and ambitions for many decades now. The paper introduced in this article about maths is a stunning reminder of what mathematics is really about. Beauty. The power of ideas. A fantastic introduction for anyone interested in finding out what real mathematics is.

I recommend reading the first 10 pages of that 25-page document. Much of the rest is about maths education. The author is clearly on a rant - but all the way to the end his arguments expose the infinite beauty of mathematics in all its simplicity.

Update - there are very strange alleys in that labyrinth called “mathematics”. Such as this example from a recent discussion:

   All elements of the empty set are floats.
   All elements of the empty set are ints.
   Ints are not floats.
   Therefore all elements of the empty set are not floats.

It leads to areas such as meta-mathematics and my all time favorite: Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Fascinating, but mind-bending. At times painfully so. If you’re more interested in (near-tangible) beauty, stick to Lockhart’s article above.