Merave’s Reviews > A Mathematician's Lament > Status Update

There is such breathtaking depth & heartbreaking beauty in this ancient art form. How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract than any abstract.

... should at all times be engaged in the process— having ideas, not having ideas, discovering patterns, making conjectures, constructing examples & counterexamples, devising arguments & critiquing each other’s work. Specific techniques & methods will arise naturally out of thisprocess, as they did historically: not isolated from, but organically connected to & as an outgrowth of, their problem-background.

Mathematics is the music of reason. To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery & conjecture, intuition & inspiration;to be in a state of confusion— not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense & you still don’t understand what your creation is up to; to have a breakthrough idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed & overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it.

If everyone were exposed to mathematics in its natural state, with all
the challenging fun and surprises that that entails, I think we would
see a dramatic change both in the attitude of students toward
mathematics, and in our conception of what it means to be “good at
math.”

he first thing to understand is that mathematics is an art. The difference between math & the other arts, such as music and painting, is that our culture does not recognize it as such. ... Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most
misunderstood.