A Mathematician is like a Naturalist
An illustrated manifesto
Published in
2 min readSep 8, 2017
A mathematician is like a naturalist. They travel far away around the world to find the strangest creatures.
They enjoy classifying. Whenever a branch of mathematics is given a classification, mathematicians rejoice.
No one is happier about a list than a mathematician, and what mathematicians like even more than lists, is finding ways to tell a list without listing (or knowing) its elements.
Mathematicians look at the world with two questions always in their minds.
The first one is:
How similar can something be to a tiger, before it is a tiger?
They take measurements and use their classifications to identify creatures they run into. By proving…
