The title to the introduction of my essay is titled “How to Fall in Love with Math.” Looking back, I realize how little I know in regards to that subject, because I may know how I fell in love with math, but I don’t know why. I don’t know why I look at an equation on a page and find it beautiful, and I am more lost when I try to extend that question to the entirety of the human race. Everything is complicated by the idea that, much like science, we are discovering math, not creating it: yes, there are some arbitrary aspects, like why one is called one and two is called two, but the patterns and concepts are not manmade. They are a product of the universe we live in. In order to try to find a simple solution to this impossible problem, I looked back at my Capstone topics. Luckily, I found a pattern of my own.

 

There are two commonalities between the problems that I love: messiness and patterns. At face value, these two ideas seem to juxtapose each other. What patterns are messy? I think that the patterns are a result of the messiness. Mathematics, at its core, is taking the disorder (messiness) of an unsolved problem and twisting it until there is a solution that brings some source of order (a pattern) to explain, without a shadow of a doubt, why the uncertainty existed. So much about a mathematical proof is proving that it is true for every single situation, and trying to prove something for infinite values is what sets mathematics apart from science; we can’t test every single number up to infinity or down to negative infinity, so our method of proof must be completely different from science’s approach. 

 

I think it goes beyond that fascination with abstract connections, because that’s not how I started to like math. There’s a picture on my iPad’s camera roll that’s been there since the day I watched that NOVA documentary on Andrew Wiles. It’s a picture of Andrew Wiles the second after he announced he’d written the proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem. There’s something about the way he’s smiling after that moment of ‘eureka’ that I connected to. I love the feeling that comes when I finally understand something that I’m struggling with, and I think that there’s something about why I fell in love with math hidden in that personal truth.

 

Just like we looked up at the stars thousands of years ago and drew archers and bears and princesses, we’ve discovered math. We connect the dots between different eureka moments, and eventually someone manages to connect the last two dots.

 

That’s why the human race studies math.

 

We have an intrinsic need to understand, whether it be through science, religion, art, poetry, or anything else humans have created. Math is based in the fundamental idea of absolute proof, and for some people, understanding why something is beautiful elevates the fact that it is. Everyone can go out into the wilderness and see how beautiful the stars are, but when I began to understand how they functioned, how they operate in the scheme of the universe, I found them so much more fascinating than when they were just twinkling lights. For me, math is about understanding, on some level, what governs our universe, and the more I discover, the more beautiful math becomes independent of what it means in the real world.

 

In the words of Stephen Hawking, “even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” This question was one of many that haunted me in A Brief History of Time. This book is the book that began my love of nonfiction; astrophysics was the gateway topic that lead me to math. Even as I write this conclusion, I can look over and see my highlighted, scribbled-in, post-it-noted copy and smile. I remember that Hawking’s book led me to Love and Math, and eventually this essay. But I have an answer to this grand philosophical question Stephen Hawking has posed, one that will surprise no one who has read this paper, but that I believe many astrophysicists would hold in great contempt.

 

I believe that it is the equations, the math itself, that breathe life into the universe.