Life Is A Math Equation Quotes

School literally doesn’t care about you unless you’re good at writing stuff down or you’re good at memorising or you can solve bloody maths equations. What about the other important things in life?

I'd never had a mind for math. ... It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a story.

If you choose to try to make a life with another person, you will live by that choice. You'd find yourself having to choose again and again to remain rather than run. It helps if you enter into a committed relationship prepared to work, ready to be humbled and willing to accept and even enjoy living in that in-between space, bouncing between the poles of beautiful and horrible, sometimes in the span of a single conversation, sometimes over the course of years. And inside of that choice and those years you'll almost certainly come to see that there is no such thing as a 50-50 balance, instead it will be like beads on an abacus, sliding back and forth, the maths rarely tidy, the equation never quite solved....

Life is a linear equation in which you can't cross multiply! If you think you can do it, you can do it. If you think you can't do it, you can't do it. It's a simple formula!

In all things in this life, we are told "It's okay if you don't make it the first time!", "It's fine if you don't get it right the first time, just try again and again!" We are told this in learning how to ride a bike, in learning how to bake a cake, in solving our math equations...in everything. Except marriage. Why are we all expected to get such an enormous and weighty thing right, the very first time, and if we don't we're considered as failures? I beg to differ! This is a stupidity!

The primary math of the real world is one and one equals two. The layman (as, often, do I) swings that every day. He goes to the job, does his work, pays his bills and comes home. One plus one equals two. It keeps the world spinning. But artists, musicians, con men, poets, mystics and such are paid to turn that math on its head, to rub two sticks together and bring forth fire. Everybody performs this alchemy somewhere in their life, but it’s hard to hold on to and easy to forget. People don’t come to rock shows to learn something. They come to be reminded of something they already know and feel deep down in their gut. That's when the world is at its best, when we are at our best, when life feels fullest, one and one equals three. It’s the essential equation of love, art, rock ’n’ roll and rock ’n’ roll bands. It’s the reason the universe will never be fully comprehensible, love will continue to be ecstatic, confounding, and true rock ’n’ roll will never die.

Our blessings are never payment for the good we’ve done, and our trials are never punishment for the wrongs we’ve done. This cause-and-effect equation is always bad spiritual math.

The primary math of the real world is one and one equals two. The layman (as, often, do I) swings that every day. He goes to the job, does his work, pays his bills and comes home. One plus one equals two. It keeps the world spinning. But artists, musicians, con men, poets, mystics and such are paid to turn that math on its head, to rub two sticks together and bring forth fire. Everybody performs this alchemy somewhere in their life, but it’s hard to hold on to and easy to forget. People don’t come to rock shows to learn something. They come to be reminded of something they already know and feel deep down in their gut. That when the world is at its best, when we are at our best, when life feels fullest, one and one equals three. It’s the essential equation of love, art, rock ’n’ roll and rock ’n’ roll bands. It’s the reason the universe will never be fully comprehensible, love will continue to be ecstatic, confounding, and true rock ’n’ roll will never die.

There are hidden meanings in equations, just as there are in poetry. If you are a novice looking at an equation in physics, and you’re not taught how to see the life underlying the symbols, the lines will look dead to you. It is when you begin to learn and supply the hidden text that the meaning slips, slides, then finally leaps to life.

Your role is to be in your life, not cut and measure it. If we are always doing the math, we are never part of the equation.

If you’re having trouble with a math problem, plug the equation into WolframAlpha.com and it will solve it for you.

Here is an equation worth remembering: Five dollars earned minus seven dollars spent = Unhappy Life." (Life Hacks, p.51)

The world to him no longer seemed a math equation but rather a complex piece of art, a masterpiece of things not easily understood.

Life is like a math equation,” he used to say. “It’s up to you to find the most beautiful solution.

Be on the right side of the equation

I'm really good with problems. I can solve a differential equation in my head. I chew through trig angles like candy. I know this, and it just makes it worse. Because I don't know how to solve this one.

I’ll be honest with you. The variables that construct my existence are confusing. Like handwritten math equations jammed together on a sloppy page of homework. They don’t make any sense. One math problem leads to another, and then another and so it goes. One day you realize that your life is one whole page of problems and nothing ever gets solved. One ongoing equation with no equal sign at the end. But it occurred to me, beneath the canopy of a starlight heaven, that I’d been looking at my life all wrong. It wasn’t a math equation. Things weren’t supposed to add up. There was no solution. In fact, there was no problem. Life’s variables and numbers and pages of chicken scratch weren’t mathematical marks. They were art. A drawing. An abstract painting. It was meant to be beautiful, not sensical. And embedded within the mess of it all were miracles. Small ones. I’d never paid attention to them because I was too busy, but it didn’t make them less real.

It's so unfair," he continues. "School literally doesn't care about you unless you're good at writing stuff down or you're good at memorising or you can solve bloody maths equations. What about the other important things in life? Like being decent human beings?

The human mind is an incredible thing. It can conceive of the magnificence of the heavens and the intricacies of the basic components of matter. Yet for each mind to achieve its full potential, it needs a spark. The spark of enquiry and wonder. Often that spark comes from a teacher. Allow me to explain. I wasn’t the easiest person to teach, I was slow to learn to read and my handwriting was untidy. But when I was fourteen my teacher at my school in St Albans, Dikran Tahta, showed me how to harness my energy and encouraged me to think creatively about mathematics. He opened my eyes to maths as the blueprint of the universe itself. If you look behind every exceptional person there is an exceptional teacher. When each of us thinks about what we can do in life, chances are we can do it because of a teacher. [...] The basis for the future of education must lie in schools and inspiring teachers. But schools can only offer an elementary framework where sometimes rote-learning, equations and examinations can alienate children from science. Most people respond to a qualitative, rather than a quantitative, understanding, without the need for complicated equations. Popular science books and articles can also put across ideas about the way we live. However, only a small percentage of the population read even the most successful books. Science documentaries and films reach a mass audience, but it is only one-way communication.

On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” Now let’s look at how Einstein articulated all of this in the famous paper that the Annalen der Physik received on June 30, 1905. For all its momentous import, it may be one of the most spunky and enjoyable papers in all of science. Most of its insights are conveyed in words and vivid thought experiments, rather than in complex equations. There is some math involved, but it is mainly what a good high school senior could comprehend. “The whole paper is a testament to the power of simple language to convey deep and powerfully disturbing ideas,” says the science writer Dennis Overbye.

Mr. Duwitt taught me math. He was an older man, and when he leaned over to show me how to work an equation, the smell of smoke and tobacco on his body was so pungent, it made me gag. His famous expression was “The mind boggles,” as in, “Derek, you can learn a complicated dance routine yet not figure out a simple simultaneous equation. The mind boggles!

It's a random universe. Shit happens. Good people get stage 4 cancer and dipshits win the lottery. There is no justice. Everything doesn't always come out square in the end. Life isn't some elegant math equation -- it's a Sergio Leone screenplay and everyone gets snuffed. Not all of us have to ante up for our portion of the tab. Some get to do the ol' dine 'n' dash.

5.4 The question of accumulation. If life is a wager, what form does it take? At the racetrack, an accumulator is a bet which rolls on profits from the success of one of the horse to engross the stake on the next one. 5.5 So a) To what extent might human relationships be expressed in a mathematical or logical formula? And b) If so, what signs might be placed between the integers?Plus and minus, self-evidently; sometimes multiplication, and yes, division. But these sings are limited. Thus an entirely failed relationship might be expressed in terms of both loss/minus and division/ reduction, showing a total of zero; whereas an entirely successful one can be represented by both addition and multiplication. But what of most relationships? Do they not require to be expressed in notations which are logically improbable and mathematically insoluble? 5.6 Thus how might you express an accumulation containing the integers b, b, a (to the first), a (to the second), s, v? B = s - v (*/+) a (to the first) Or a (to the second) + v + a (to the first) x s = b 5.7 Or is that the wrong way to put the question and express the accumulation? Is the application of logic to the human condition in and of itself self-defeating? What becomes of a chain of argument when the links are made of different metals, each with a separate frangibility? 5.8 Or is "link" a false metaphor? 5.9 But allowing that is not, if a link breaks, wherein lies the responsibility for such breaking? On the links immediately on the other side, or on the whole chain? But what do you mean by "the whole chain"? How far do the limits of responsibility extend? 6.0 Or we might try to draw the responsibility more narrowly and apportion it more exactly. And not use equations and integers but instead express matters in the traditional narrative terminology. So, for instance, if...." - Adrian Finn

Lao-tzu advised, “As soon as you have a thought, laugh at it,” because reality is not what we think. We perceive the world through a window colored by beliefs, interpretations, and associations. We see things not as they are but as we are. The same brain that enables us to contemplate philosophy, solve math equations, and create poetry also generates a stream of static known as discursive thoughts, which seem to arise at random, bubbling up into our awareness. Such mental noise is a natural phenomenon, no more of a problem than the dreams that appear in the sleep state. Therefore, our schooling aims not to struggle with random thoughts but to transcend them in the present moment, where no thoughts exist, only awareness. Our mind’s liberation awaits not in some imagined future but here and now.

Over the years, this revealing “Zurich Notebook” has been dissected and analyzed by a team of scholars including Jürgen Renn, John D. Norton, Tilman Sauer, Michel Janssen, and John Stachel.17 In it Einstein pursued a two-fisted approach. On the one hand, he engaged in what was called a “physical strategy,” in which he tried to build the correct equations from a set of requirements dictated by his feel for the physics. At the same time, he pursued a “mathematical strategy,” in which he tried to deduce the correct equations from the more formal math requirements using the tensor analysis that Grossmann and others recommended.

Therein lies the key, I think, to Einstein’s brilliance and the lessons of his life. As a young student he never did well with rote learning. And later, as a theorist, his success came not from the brute strength of his mental processing power but from his imagination and creativity. He could construct complex equations, but more important, he knew that math is the language nature uses to describe her wonders. So he could visualize how equations were reflected in realities—how the electromagnetic field equations discovered by James Clerk Maxwell, for example, would manifest themselves to a boy riding alongside a light beam. As he once declared, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”6

He would have to keep her, somehow, and that would mean solving her. That would mean making her his impossible problem. Time travel no longer held any interest for him, only Regan and whatever it would take to make her a fixture in his life. Knowing her would mean knowing everything, not just her thoughts or her truths or the way she liked to be fucked. Knowing her would mean knowing her future, having it for himself. It was knowing what her children would look like, and what she would look like someday, when the youth was gone from her face and replaced by something else; by what? A mystery. It was a fucking mystery and Aldo couldn’t sit idly by while there were mysteries afoot. Uncertainty was something he lived with, yes, but not anymore. Frustration and restraint, she had said, equating his love of math with his love of her. I am Atlas, he thought, holding up the heavens. I will be endurance, I will have to endure.

My name is Charlie Chucky, I am in the sixth grade, I love playing Minecraft, and I am learning to become a Super Spy. My Dad is the world’s best Super Spy, and he is starting to teach me all his tricks. Lately, I’ve been battling invisible giants, crazy zombie teachers, and super ninjas! Life has been pretty crazy, and I’ve enjoyed every second of it. My best friend Harley is different to me. He doesn’t want to become a Super Spy. He doesn’t want to battle bad guys and save the world each week. Nope. He wants to sit indoors and stare at numbers all day. Harley’s dream is to become the world’s greatest math professor. He loves school, he loves studying, and he absolutely loves math tests.  He goes mad for them. It is the one thing he is really good at. He just loves numbers.  Numbers are like candy for him – he can’t get enough of it. He even asked Mrs. Jackson for extra math homework last night. Mrs. Jackson then decided to give the whole class extra math homework. Let’s just say Harley wasn’t that popular after school.  This is Harley. Mrs. Jackson always says that someday math will save our lives, but I can’t see how it will. Maybe one day, four giant numbers will attack our school, and I will defeat them using an algebra equation… or maybe the numbers in my textbook will go bad, and start attacking all the words on the pages, and I will stop them using a calculator!

The point is that I loved math with a passion. I loved the order, the clarity of it, the absolute in it. And I think that my students felt that, for me, something more than mere math was involved, an attitude toward life itself. I liked a straight answer to a straight question, in just the way that I felt the beauty of a perfect equation or, even more, a geometric figure.

Sometimes I feel compelled to do something, but I can only guess later why it needed to done, and I question whether I am drawing connections where none really exist. Other times I see an event – in a dream or in a flash of “knowing” – and I feel compelled to work toward changing the outcome (if it’s a negative event) or ensuring it (when the event is positive). At the times I am able to work toward changing or ensuring the predicted event, sometimes this seems to make a difference, and sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter. Finally, and most often, throughout my life I have known mundane information before I should have known it. For example, one of my favourite games in school was to guess what numbers my math teacher would use to demonstrate a concept, or to guess the words on a vocabulary test before the test was given. I noticed I was not correct all the time, but I was correct enough to keep playing the game. Perhaps partially because of the usefulness of this mundane skill, I was an outstanding student, getting straight As and graduating from college with highest honours in neuroscience and a minor in computer science. I was a modest drinker even in college, but I found I could ace tests when I was hungover after a night of indulgence. Sometimes I think I even did better the less I paid attention to the test and the more I felt sick or spacey. It was like my unconscious mind could take over and put the correct information onto the page without interruption from my overly analytical conscious mind. At graduate school in neuroscience, I focused on trying to understand human experience by studying how the brain processes pain and stress. I wanted to know the answer to the question: what’s going on inside people’s heads when we suffer? Later, as I finished my PhD in psychoacoustics, which is all about the psychology of sound, I became fascinated with timing. How do we figure out the order of sounds, even when some sounds take longer to process than others? How can drummers learn to decode time differences of 1/1,000 of a second, when most people just can’t hear those kinds of subtle time differences? At this point, I was using my premonitions as just one of the tools in my day-to-day toolkit, but I wasn’t thinking about them scientifically. At least not consciously. Sure, every so often I’d dream of the slides that would be used by one of my professors the next day in class. Or I’d realize that the data I was recording in my experiments followed the curve of an equation I’d dreamed about a year before. But I thought that was just my quirky way of doing things – it was just my good student’s intuition and it didn’t have anything to do with my research interests or my life’s work. What was my life’s work again?

I realized something today. I think I always believed that people were worried about very abstract things. Like life, fate, politics, that kind of thing. You know I like math," Ki-yong tries to explain. "You always said that it was the purest abstract world." "Exactly. Time flies so fast when I'm working on an equation. I always thought everyone had that side to them. but now, today, everyone's..." "Everyone's what?" Soji asks. "Everyone's just struggling to survive. They're doing everything they can to survive. Why was I the only one who didn't realize that?

Your role is to be in your life, not cut an measure it. If we are always doing the math, we are never part of the equation.

When it comes to our own well being, it is not a matter of doing the math, it is a matter of choosing the formula. When you add up the numbers, keep the primary factors in mind. Then multiply all sums by a positive outlook. The numbers will inevitably change and so will any undesirable equivalence. The math is merely the meter for the moment in an ever changing flux of the dynamic human equation.

Zero is equation of life

thought that maths was linked to nature and space and time, and that life could be rationalized, if only we could find the right equation. I thought there was a real connection between patterns in the world – nature’s mathematics – and our collective human emotions. Somewhere inside me, in my redundant, embarrassing hippie heart, I still feel this.

Physicists study the vast number of stars, examining equations and mathematical odds, and say there must be something else out there like us. Biologists look down at our own planet, at all the specific things that occurred for evolution to work, and say, ‘not likely.’ It’s not a math equation, but if it were, the sheer odds of other sentient life even remotely like us are incalculable—even in the vastness of outer space.

If you choose to try to make a life with another person, you will live by that choice. You’ll find yourself having to choose again and again to remain rather than run. It helps if you enter a committed relationship prepared to work, ready to be humbled, and willing to accept and even enjoy living in that in-between span of a single conversation, sometimes over the course of years. And inside of that choice and those years, you’ll almost certainly come to see that there’s no such thing as a fifty-fifty balance. Instead, it’ll be like beads on an abacus, sliding back and forth—the math rarely tidy, the equation never quite solved. A relationship is dynamic this way, full of change, always evolving. At no point will both of you feel like things are perfectly fair and equal. Someone will always be adjusting. Someone will always be sacrificing. One person may be up while the other person is down, one might bear more financial pressures, while the other person handles household and caregiving responsibilites. Those choices and the stress that goes along with them are real. I’ve come to realize though, that life happens in seasons. Your fulfillment—in love, family and career—rarely happens all at once. In a strong relationship both people will take their turns at compromise, building that shared sense of home together, there in the in-between Regardless of how wildly and deeply in love you are, you will be asked to on board a whole lot of your partners' foibles, you will be required to ignore all sorts of minor irritations and at least a few major ones too trying to assert love and constancy over all of it over all the rough spots and an invisible disruptions you will need to do this as often and as compassionately as you can. And you will need to be doing it with someone who is equally able and willing to create the same latitude and show this same forbearance toward you --to love you despite all the baggage you show up with, despite what you look like and how you behave when you are at your absolute worst.

Dividing people into political identities is to add attention to their differences and subtract attention from their similarities. To think that the sum of this equation is equality for all is not only absurd it is decidedly bad math.

satisfaction is possible—just not with the old formulas. We need to toss out all that bad math and use this one equation instead, which incorporates the wisdom of Siddhartha and Thomas and the best modern social science: Satisfaction = What you have ÷ what you want Your satisfaction is what you have, divided by what you want.

When we encounter some kind of pain that doesn't fit our faith equation, our thoughts about God and faith in him are shaken, sometimes to the point of abandoning of faith. The math of a pain-free life doesn't add up, which leads to the logical (albeit incorrect) conclusion that everything else we believe is also false.

I have confirmed from my many years of teaching abstract mathematics to art students that I am not the only one who prefers to use abstract ideas to illuminate concrete examples rather than the other way round. Many of these art students consider that they’re bad at math because they were bad at memorizing times tables, because they’re bad at mental arithmetic, and they can’t solve equations. But this doesn’t mean they’re bad at math—it just means they’re not very good at times tables, mental arithmetic and equations, an absolutely tiny part of mathematics that hardly counts as abstract at all. It turns out that they do not struggle nearly as much when we get to abstract things such as higher dimensional spaces, subtle notions of equivalence, and category theory structures. Their blockage on mental arithmetic becomes irrelevant.

If you choose to try to make a life with another person, you will live by that choice. You'd find yourself having to choose again and again to remain rather than run. It helps if you enter into a committed relationship prepared to work, ready to be humbled and willing to accept and even enjoy living in that in-between space, bouncing between the poles of beautiful and horrible, sometimes in the span of a single conversation, sometimes over the course of years. And inside of that choice and those years you'll almost certainly come to see that there is no such thing as a 50-50 balance, instead it will be like beads on an abacus, sliding back and forth, the maths rarely tidy, the equation never quite solved. ....A relationship is dynamic this way, full of change always evolving. At no point will both of you feel like things are perfectly fair and equal, someone will always be adjusting, someone will always be sacrificing, one person may be up while the other is down. One might bear more of the financial pressures while the other bears caregiving and family obligations. Those choices and the stresses that go along with them are real. I've come to realized though that life happens in seasons. Your fulfillment in love, family and career rarely happens all at once. In a strong partnership both people will take turns at compromise building a shared sense of home together, there in the in-between, regardless of how wildly and deeply in love you are, you will be asked to onboard a lot of your partners foibles, you will be required to ignore all minor irritations and a few major ones too...

If you choose to try to make a life with another person, you will live by that choice. You'd find yourself having to choose again and again to remain rather than run. It helps if you enter into a committed relationship prepared to work, ready to be humbled and willing to accept and even enjoy living in that in-between space, bouncing between the poles of beautiful and horrible, sometimes in the span of a single conversation, sometimes over the course of years. And inside of that choice and those years you'll almost certainly come to see that there is no such thing as a 50-50 balance, instead it will be like beads on an abacus, sliding back and forth, the maths rarely tidy, the equation never quite solved…..

The fact of zero He added nonstop: Did you know that zero was not used throughout human history! Until 781 A.D, when it was first embodied and used in arithmetic equations by the Arab scholar Al-Khwarizmi, the founder of algebra. Algorithms took their name from him, and they are algorithmic arithmetic equations that you have to follow as they are and you will inevitably get the result, the inevitable result. And before that, across tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, humans refused to deal with zero. While the first reference to it was in the Sumerian civilization, where inscriptions were found three thousand years ago in Iraq, in which the Sumerians indicated the existence of something before the one, they refused to deal with it, define it and give it any value or effect, they refused to consider it a number. All these civilizations, some of which we are still unable to decipher many of their codes, such as the Pharaonic civilization that refused to deal with zero! We see them as smart enough to build the pyramids with their miraculous geometry and to calculate the orbits of stars and planets with extreme accuracy, but they are very stupid for not defining zero in a way that they can deal with, and use it in arithmetic operations, how strange this really is! But in fact, they did not ignore it, but gave it its true value, and refused to build their civilizations on an unknown and unknown illusion, and on a wrong arithmetical frame of reference. Throughout their history, humans have looked at zero as the unknown, they refused to define it and include it in their calculations and equations, not because it has no effect, but because its true effect is unknown, and remaining unknown is better than giving it a false effect. Like the wrong frame of reference, if you rely on it, you will inevitably get a wrong result, and you will fall into the inevitability of error, and if you ignore it, your chance of getting it right remains. Throughout their history, humans have preferred to ignore zero, not knowing its true impact, while we simply decided to deal with it, and even rely on it. Today we build all our ideas, our civilization, our software, mathematics, physics, everything, on the basis that 1 + 0 equals one, because we need to find the effect of zero so that our equations succeed, and our lives succeed with, but what if 1 + 0 equals infinity?! Why did we ignore the zero in summation, and did not ignore it in multiplication?! 1×0 equals zero, why not one? What is the reason? He answered himself: There is no inevitable reason, we are not forced. Humans have lived throughout their ages without zero, and it did not mean anything to them. Even when we were unable to devise any result that fits our theorems for the quotient of one by zero, then we admitted and said unknown, and ignored it, but we ignored the logic that a thousand pieces of evidence may not prove me right, and one proof that proves me wrong. Not doing our math tables in the case of division, blowing them up completely, and with that, we decided to go ahead and built everything on that foundation. We have separated the arithmetic tables in detail at our will, to fit our calculations, and somehow separate the whole universe around us to fit these tables, despite their obvious flaws. And if we decide that the result of one multiplied by zero is one instead of zero, and we reconstruct the whole world on this basis, what will happen? He answered himself: Nothing, we will also succeed, the world, our software, our thoughts, our dealings, and everything around us will be reset according to the new arithmetic tables. After a few hundred years, humans will no longer be able to understand that one multiplied by zero equals zero, but that it must be one because everything is built on this basis.

If you choose to try to make a life with another person, you will live by that choice. You'd find yourself having to choose again and again to remain rather than run. It helps if you enter into a committed relationship prepared to work, ready to be humbled and willing to accept and even enjoy living in that in-between space, bouncing between the poles of beautiful and horrible, sometimes in the span of a single conversation, sometimes over the course of years. And inside of that choice and those years you'll almost certainly come to see that there is no such thing as a 50-50 balance, instead it will be like beads on an abacus, sliding back and forth, the maths rarely tidy, the equation never quite solved. ....A relationship is dynamic this way, full of change always evolving. At no point will both of you feel like things are perfectly fair and equal, someone will always be adjusting, someone will always be sacrificing, one person may be up while the other is down. One might bear more of the financial pressures while the other bears caregiving and family obligations. Those choices and the stresses that go along with them are real. I've come to realized though that life happens in seasons. Your fulfillment in love, family and career rarely happens all at once. In a strong partnership both people will take turns at compromise building a shared sense of home together, there in the in-between, regardless of how wildly and deeply in love you are, you will be asked to onboard a lot of your partners foibles, you will be required to ignore all minor irritations and a few major ones too...

Do you see?” asked Renee. “I’ve just disproved most of mathematics: it’s all meaningless now.” She was getting agitated, almost distraught; Carl chose his words carefully. “How can you say that? Math still works. The scientific and economic worlds aren’t suddenly going to collapse from this realization.” “That’s because the mathematics they’re using is just a gimmick. It’s a mnemonic trick, like counting on your knuckles to figure out which months have thirty-one days.” “That’s not the same.” “Why isn’t it? Now mathematics has absolutely nothing to do with reality. Never mind concepts like imaginaries or infinitesimals. Now goddamn integer addition has nothing to do with counting on your fingers. One and one will always get you two on your fingers, but on paper I can give you an infinite number of answers, and they’re all equally valid, which means they’re all equally invalid. I can write the most elegant theorem you’ve ever seen, and it won’t mean any more than a nonsense equation.” She gave a bitter laugh. “The positivists used to say all mathematics is a tautology. They had it all wrong: it’s a contradiction.” Carl tried a different approach. “Hold on. You just mentioned imaginary numbers. Why is this any worse than what went on with those? Mathematicians once believed they were meaningless, but now they’re accepted as basic. This is the same situation.” “It’s not the same. The solution there was to simply expand the context, and that won’t do any good here. Imaginary numbers added something new to mathematics, but my formalism is redefining what’s already there.” “But if you change the context, put it in a different light—” She rolled her eyes. “No! This follows from the axioms as surely as addition does; there’s no way around it. You can take my word for it.” 7

I had been running a mental math equation in my head for a while. News of my death would be devastating for Jill. I knew she loved me. She was a sucker, I thought, for doing so, but apparently it couldn't be helped. To this point, I had believed that the payoff for her devastation in that moment would be the better life she would have without me. It's how I imagined law school works: you go through the hard times to get to better times. On that bridge, the image of Jill receiving this news became more crystalline: phone calls trying to locate me would become increasingly frantic until there was a cop at the door. I knew she was wearing a blue sweater that morning and I knew where she'd be standing when the cops showed up. Her pain, because I loved her, was acute in my imagining. It hurt, and it was nauseating, too. I still believed, at least intellectually, that she'd be better off without me, but how could I enable that horrible moment? How could I bring that cop to the door?

Math is the realest thing of all. Existence is mathematical, energy is mathematical, and you yourself are 100% mathematical. You will never know who you are – you will never arrive at the answer to your existence and the meaning of your life – until you understand what you are. You are pure math – whether you like it or not! You are an individual, autonomous, self-solving, self-optimising node in an unimaginably vast, collective, cosmic, self-solving, self-optimising mathematical equation ... the equation of existence. The answer to existence is inside you right now. Only math can extract it. Isn’t it time you learned what math actually is?

The universe is alive. Rules and equations aren’t dead... they’re the formulae for life itself. They are Platonic Forms of Life. Monads – the basic constituents of living mathematics – are living, self-solving, self-optimising minds. Life is breathed into math because math is inherently alive. Of course, you have to be an idealist, not a materialist, to understand this.

Skin in the game can make boring things less boring. When you have skin in the game, dull things like checking the safety of the aircraft because you may be forced to be a passenger in it cease to be boring. If you are an investor in a company, doing ultra-boring things like reading the footnotes of a financial statement (where the real information is to be found) becomes, well, almost not boring. But there is an even more vital dimension. Many addicts who normally have a dull intellect and the mental nimbleness of a cauliflower—or a foreign policy expert—are capable of the most ingenious tricks to procure their drugs. When they undergo rehab, they are often told that should they spend half the mental energy trying to make money as they did procuring drugs, they are guaranteed to become millionaires. But, to no avail. Without the addiction, their miraculous powers go away. It was like a magical potion that gave remarkable powers to those seeking it, but not those drinking it. A confession. When I don’t have skin in the game, I am usually dumb. My knowledge of technical matters, such as risk and probability, did not initially come from books. It did not come from lofty philosophizing and scientific hunger. It did not even come from curiosity. It came from the thrills and hormonal flush one gets while taking risks in the markets. I never thought mathematics was something interesting to me until, when I was at Wharton, a friend told me about the financial options I described earlier (and their generalization, complex derivatives). I immediately decided to make a career in them. It was a combination of financial trading and complicated probability. The field was new and uncharted. I knew in my guts there were mistakes in the theories that used the conventional bell curve and ignored the impact of the tails (extreme events). I knew in my guts that academics had not the slightest clue about the risks. So, to find errors in the estimation of these probabilistic securities, I had to study probability, which mysteriously and instantly became fun, even gripping. When there was risk on the line, suddenly a second brain in me manifested itself, and the probabilities of intricate sequences became suddenly effortless to analyze and map. When there is fire, you will run faster than in any competition. When you ski downhill some movements become effortless. Then I became dumb again when there was no real action. Furthermore, as traders the mathematics we used fit our problem like a glove, unlike academics with a theory looking for some application—in some cases we had to invent models out of thin air and could not afford the wrong equations. Applying math to practical problems was another business altogether; it meant a deep understanding of the problem before writing the equations.

Applying math to practical problems was another business altogether; it meant a deep understanding of the problem before writing the equations. But if you muster the strength to weight-lift a car to save a child, above your current abilities, the strength gained will stay after things calm down. So, unlike the drug addict who loses his resourcefulness, what you learn from the intensity and the focus you had when under the influence of risk stays with you. You may lose the sharpness, but nobody can take away what you’ve learned. This is the principal reason I am now fighting the conventional educational system, made by dweebs for dweebs. Many kids would learn to love mathematics if they had some investment in it, and, more crucially, they would build an instinct to spot its misapplications.

But when the purity and community equations proved to be bad math, everything 'just crumbled.' How could she believe anything evangelicalism taught her if the one thing they said was most important - remain pure before marriage and you will have a blissful sexual life after marriage and be supported by the larger community - wasn't true? "To me, it meant there was no God," Muriel said[.]

Life is like an equation, and mine is perfectly balanced. Nana + Uncle Paul + Math = Happiness Other people might need to add in friends or sports or money or something else, but my equation is already solved.