Who are you?
What questions are you wrestling with?
Where are you looking for your answers?
Are you satisfied with having a safe, secure and distinguished career?
Or is your greatest work waiting for you in the infinity of possibilities?
Do you hover above the chaos looking for your answers in patterns and trends?
Or do you need to be in ground level, walking through the problem?
I used to have this photo of the Parthenon when I was a child, and one day I scribbled all over it with a crayon – until recently, I realized that I covered it with rectangles within rectangles, retracing the Greek’s use of the golden ratio. Does that speak to the mathematicians in the need to understand beauty or to the child who had to tear it apart?
John von Neumann once said that in mathematics you don’t understand things you just get used to them. I wish I could have debated that point with him – because it seems to me that in mathematics, we find the power to refuse fate, and to understand the way things are, we give ourselves the means to change them.
Our ancestors’ stories belong to us now. Each of their signatures is a self-swallowing set, a name that short-hands a body of thought. A life’s work.
In the end, the question isn’t who you are. The question is: who did I turn out to be? Who am I to you? Are faded marks and scratches on the floor the only evidence I was here?
Or did some scribbled note, some fragment of a proof, infer to your perception of the world; even confirm it, cementing what you felt in your heart to be true – with the balance of left column to right.
What footprints have I left behind? Do they endure? Or has the ocean of discovery washed them away already?
How many lives have I touched? Have I touched yours?
