Groundwork

“God is a mathematician of a very high order and He used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.”

– Paul Dirac (1902-1984), formulator of the Dirac Equation (which turned Schrodinger’s quantum mechanical wave equation relatistic), predictor of antimatter (positrons), winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize, holder the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge (once held by Isaac Newton and, later, Stephen Hawking).

He was also painfully shy. A “dirac” is a unit defined as “one word per hour.”

Another metaphor I find quite pleasing is the image of mountain peaks rising disjointedly above the cloud line. Each mountain peak represents a mathematical concept: pi, trigonometric identities, prime numbers, infinitesimals of calculus, non-Euclidean geometry, logarithms, you name it. They are all there, and can be observed and studied from our vantage point. But what cannot be ascertained fully are their connections to each other, the underlying groundwork or structure, that, in this image, is obscured by dense (and sometimes not-so-dense) clouds.

I like that.

I believe both ideas here. They’re kinda like the same thing expressed in different ways.