When I left my boxed township of Il inois farmland to attend my dad’s alma mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I al of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. I’m starting to see why this was so. Col ege math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home. I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids—and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hil y Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light.
Calculus was,
quite literal y, child’s play.
Maths are eveywhere, although some landscapes are more
explicit than others. For example, the Mid-West, but also the olive groves in
the province of Jaén.
The ability of thinking abstractly about mathematical entities of Nature,
typical of huge intelligences, is one of the shortest ways to madness.
I,ve read Foster Wallace tennis texts yet again ( I used to love them when I
was younger) because I,m playing tennis these days due to Covid ( a sport full
of geometry and trigonometry, by the way). So, we can say that the Covid has transformed me from a player of friendly games
of football to an amateur tennis one.
In fact, when I knew the news about Maradona death, I was playing tennis and this paradox made me feel a bit guity
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