Pretty Math

Hear me out, dear reader. Math is pretty.

The best math reads a bit like a musical composition–there are movements. There are lovely moments of relative calm taking shape in rows of zeros. There are moments of chaos also–tiny equations etched urgently. Straight lines and arrows conduct the viewer–moving us forward through impossibility. My favorite kind of math looks like Chopin reimagined; intricate, quick etudes and long, lilting melodies.

Though this sounds sentimental, it really isn’t. The concepts explained on a page of tireless calculation have the same foundations as the concepts great composers use when writing music; what sounds good–what feels good–and why things move the way they do.

Maybe it’s the forced isolation–but either way–I’ve found myself writing a lot of parallels between math and religion. And the ceremonial aspects of sitting down with these huuuuge concepts of life and our reality and working them out. 

Artists in every medium do this–painters on canvas and sculptors with clay–writers with words and overly emotional metaphors (of which I am super guilty.) Mathematicians do this through calculation–through understanding and recording numbers and shapes.

Here’s my favorite bit of prosey poetry in this genre which, and i promise this is real, is called Quantum Poetics.

To Be Poised 

The beauty of ceremony is kept here–a laborious process and the knowledge of why it’s real. Closer to worship than any baptismal kneeling or nodding, it’s here. The holy exists without our consent–material and maternal–hidden to the mind only temporarily, and never to the body. See, we live inside it, too. 

The beauty of ceremony is lost in what is done for its own sake. A number carried over is not knowledge but empty practice. We move in self-absorbed limitation. Refusing depth outright, or perhaps it’s in conditioning. We aren’t blind, but selective–searching for convenience and salvation both. 

The pain of knowing why, of having more questions than possible answers. Of pressing on in spite of this. This is the lovely cut of understanding, which is, if honored, called God. 

I love you, dear reader.

That adds up.