/lit/ - Literature

Eh. Double majored in math and comparative lit, currently PhD in mathematics. Once you clear the pesky arithemetic and knock a little calculus in your head, it's really nice. Higher-order math has this crystalline, cold beauty to it, glowing with soft white light from some deep center. It just never ends. It's almost like a cathedral carved out of ice. You could lose yourself examining one corner in one room in one wing off one hall of the entire structure.

I don't know. Anne Carson once said that if language was a tree, English was playing around in the leaves and Ancient Greek was the root-ends. It's like that with math too, except for the whole world. You almost gain another set of eyes, another vision overlaid on top of what you normally see. The parabola inscribed by a jump rope, the flat curves of kitchen chairs, leaves bobbing in a creek or the fractals of clouds expanding into one blue infinite plane. If language is the stuff of human thought, math is the world's vocabulary. Each branch you learn is another dialect.