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."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.I came back to mathematics as I was learning programming as an adult.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.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.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.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.My question to math-heads, is abstraction more perverse in Mathematics? Does it serve a purpose?