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October 12, 2004
Titlequest
I am not a mathematician.
I find math excruciating.
I don't see what anyone finds interesting about it. Everyone acknowledges its usefulness, but nobody seems to derive any real pleasure from it.
Math is not objective. Math is a way for intellectual narcissists to claim superiority over others. "Oh yeah, I might be ugly, socially inept, and unqualified to do anything that might actually be useful in the world, but *I* know how to do a Lebesgue Integral and I can (and do) recite the Cauchy-Schwartz inequality in my sleep. Yup, that's right. I AM SMARTER THAN YOU."
Smarter in what way? Some mathematicians feel (that's right, feel) that their's is the only discipline that "discovers" things that exist independent of the human mind. They think that somehow their version of mathematics is universal and Aliens across the galaxy will "do math" the same way.
There is no reason to think that Aliens would do math our way. They are just as likely to have independently developed Cuneiform.
Now that I've vented, I can get to the real issue. They *are* smarter than me. Every day I go to class. Every day I don't know what they are talking about. I don't mean they lose me in the minutia, I really haven't a clue what they say after "Good afternoon."
At the end of each lecture, I leave class thoroughly demoralized and wondering how I could ever have purported to actually be *good* at this stuff.
Then I remember that I am convinced that math is arbitrary and not nearly as cool as people assert it to be. I can then shift my pondering to the issue of *why* I would ever purport to be good at it.
So that's it. I'm not, never have been, and never will be a mathematician.
What, then, am I exactly? I'm no longer a soldier (I wasn't good at that either), I'm not an athlete, I'm not an activist, I'm not a musician, and I'm not really even a student anymore.
What it is inside me that so desperately needs to have a title? I find myself searching for that label and all I can find is "unemployed bum who's is about to be an unemployed bum-parent.
This is not satisfactory.
So I begin the quest for my new title. I'll keep you updated.
Posted by james at 06:36 PM | Comments (0)