Terence Tao

I just found that really eye-opening.

It's not just getting a proof for a result was interesting, but once you have that proof, trying to

to optimize it in various ways.

That proofing itself had some craftsmanship to it.

It's something for my writing style that, you know, like when you do your math assignments as an undergraduate, your homework and so forth, you're sort of encouraged to just write down any proof that works and hand it in.

As long as it gets a tick mark, you move on.

But if you want your results to actually be influential and be read by people, it can't just be correct.

It should also be a pleasure to read, motivated, be adaptable to generalize to other things.

It's the same in many other disciplines, like coding.

There's a lot of analogies between math and coding.

I like analogies, if you haven't noticed.

But, you know, like, you can code something spaghettical that works for a certain task, and it's quick and dirty and it works, but there's lots of good principles for writing code well so that other people can use it, build upon it, and so on, and has fewer bugs and whatever.

And there's similar things with mathematics.

sort of the programs or in this case the proofs but also the different languages maybe that's a different notation or whatever to use to accomplish a different task yeah you learn a lot I mean it may seem like a frivolous exercise but it can generate all these insights which if you didn't have this artificial objective to pursue you might not see

Yeah.

Well, as I said, I mean, what I find most appealing is connections between different things.

So if the pi i equals minus one.

So yeah, people are like, oh, this is all the fundamental constants.

Okay, that's, I mean, that's cute.

But to me, the exponential function was to measure exponential growth.