A man once asked me why anyone should do mathematics. I asked him why anyone should write poetry.
During my early twenties, my primary concern was making a living. It’s why I went into software engineering. It took a decade, but I was eventually able to build a career and get paid well enough to start thinking about things other than getting paid.
And then, with little warning, I felt a pull toward mathematics.
It wasn’t practical. If anything, it felt like a distraction from the work that had moved my life forward. Yet this compulsion cared little for my plans.
Math was my first love. I left it behind because I couldn’t see how it would fit into my life.
The pull continued.
I talked to a man who is now a treasured friend and mentor. He advised me, “That feeling is unlikely to ever go away. You’re always going to be drawn to this.” I knew he was right.
After that conversation, I decided that I had made my living and that it was time to build a life, with mathematics as a major component of that life.
I have long tried to explain to people what makes mathematics so special. I’ve talked about beauty, abstraction, and how ideas connect in eerie ways. But somehow my words have always fallen short. Perhaps that is the deepest irony: I insist mathematics is poetry, yet I cannot find the words for it.