… I’m Really Rather Tired

And I can’t do this any more.

This is an issue I’ve been wrestling with for a while now. When I first went off to college, I was full of excitement and verve. I could see the universe, in all its entirety, a vast mathematical web stretching out to infinity, waiting to be unwound, solved, and expounded upon. Mathematics seemed the key to everything – and I was to be the one to solve it.

But then it began – it’s hard to know how it started. A creeping depression that … I was wrong. Something I certainly wasn’t used to. Was it Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem? A statement of fact that not everything true was provable? Could it be that some problems just couldn’t be solved? Was that any consolation for the growing certainty that I was not going to be the one to solve them? Was it the fact that so much of mathematics – set theory, for example – was, in point of fact, boring?

Theorems lost their meaning as they became little more than recombinations of axioms that have little to no bearing or significance. Weeks of proving result after result that we trivially know to be true, while the questions of interest slip further into the realm of unknowable. You end up asking yourself, what is it you’re really after? You thought you enjoyed math, but that was before, evidently, you knew what math really was.

Despair is the only word to describe it. The hopeless realization that the path you’ve set yourself upon leads to a castle, yes, but one built on a foundation of groundless assumptions. Does anyone really know what Knot Theory is good for? You find yourself trapped in a world of theory where anything can be what you define it to be. And never knowing what it really is.

I’m tired. Really tired. And I’ve had enough.

I’m giving up maths. I apologize to my few, interested readers, who have followed me all this time, but I really cannot carry myself any further, having lost all interest in what I thought I held dear. I will be dropping out of the Mellon College of Science and entering the College of Humanities and Social Sciences to pursue a degree in philosophy, and a minor in creative writing.

Thank you for your time and attention – but honestly, let’s all move on to something -real-.

… April Fool’s ^.^