All The Math You Will Ever Need |
From Smilla's Sense of Snow, a 1992 novel by Danish author Peter Høeg If anyone asked me what makes me truly happy, I would say: numbers. Snow and
ice and numbers. And do you know why? But human consciousness expands. The child discovers a sense of longing, and do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something. And human consciousness expands and grows even more, and the child discovers the in-between spaces. Between stones, between pieces of moss on the stones, between people. And between numbers. And do you know what that leads to? It leads to fractions. Whole numbers plus fractions produce
rational numbers. And human consciousness doesn't stop there. It wants to go
beyond reason. It adds an operation as absurd as the extraction of roots. And
produces irrational numbers. |