The Art of Mathematics
"...you can find Kitchloo at a cafe. He admits he’ll spend hours there, nursing a coffee or tea, and staring off into space, deep in thought...trying to get a feeling for the object he’s studying."<p>That's how people who 'hate' math feel. They stare at the page, run their minds in circles and feel like they're lost in space.<p>I came back to mathematics as I was learning programming as an adult.<p>One thing I cannot stand is the general lack of definitions. My mind is oriented to programming where anything outside of the language must be defined in scope. Or maps, which have a legend and define abstract symbols.<p>But that's just not the case in mathematics. You read the book. Start on page one. Eventually you get to a formula. You can scrape the text all you want, but there are characters without a definition.<p>What's more, if you try to use other texts to find the definition, some special characters have different values. Or the forumla is defined differently.<p>OK. I get it. Just as with a programming language, once you pass a certain threashold, it's possible to reason past these inconsistencies and over the gaps.<p>My question to math-heads, is abstraction more perverse in Mathematics? Does it serve a purpose?