You can send as an attachment. Thanks!!!

I just wanted to drop this quote from a book I was reading.
“One of Hilbert’s [David Hilbert, mathematician] students stopped showing up to classes. On enquiring the reason, Hilbert was told that the student had left the university to become a poet. Hilbert: ‘I can’t say I’m surprised. I never thought he had enough imagination to be a mathematician.’”

I think that the greatest misconception about mathematics is that you learn mathematics in high school (I must admit that I did not know what it was either). Math is not really about formulas and numbers (though they are a subset of it), but rather about a different way of looking at the world. It is more philosophy than anything else.

For example, in one of my classes we have been talking about Godel’s Incompletness Theorem, which basically states that under any reasonable axiomatic system of mathematics, we will not be able to be prove everything that is true under that theory. Most of modern mathematics is based on an infinite set of axioms (which is considered reasonable since we have an algorithm for constructing it) but even though we have found so much under this system, we don’t know if the bulk of the truth in this system has been proved or if it is even accessible under these conditions! Fascinating stuff… definitely not high school mathematics.

I’m coming home for summer. Maybe we can meet up sometime. Send me an e-mail when you have a chance.