I miss math:

I was sitting in the calculus class I TA for yesterday (awake, shockingly enough), and the teacher wrote a theorem out. He was talking about it and I started thinking about how to prove it. The first words that came into my mind were "Assume not." Not that that's how they do proofs in 130s, but I was trained pretty thoroughly, I guess. I started thinking.

I mean, I haven't done any real math in over six months now, since last June. I thought I needed the summer and fall off, to try to regain my sanity (I think I failed. Last night, I demonstrated to the cat how I was going to take a shower). I figured I would see whether I missed it during these six months and make some decisions about my life. And the thing is, I really didn't. I didn't even really think about it. I came back here and opted not to take any math classes this quarter. After all, I didn't need to, and why bother? But maybe I was just too far away this summer and fall. Now that I'm close again, taking physics and TAing for math, I miss it again.

I miss the rigor, mostly, the way you have to take this step and then that step and then the next and if you don't do it exactly right, it's wrong. I miss the beauty, the way complex analysis all came together ninth week and all I could think was wow. Everything else seems mushy and not at all intuitive compared to math.

I became a math major because of analysis, specifically because of one moment when proofs by induction came together in my head. I finally understood when to use an induction argument, and how, and why it worked. It was a moment where two weeks of work made sense. I've had a handful of other moments like that in my mathematical career, the time I figured out all those stupid domains and how they fit together in algebra, the moment complex stopped being a mess of integrals and started being beautiful, the time I figured out delta-epsilon proofs, the time the Axiom of Choice turned into something more than a college bowl question.

I've never had these flashes of intuition outside of math, whether because I've never gotten far enough in any field to get there or because they don't exist, at least not in the same way, and I miss it. It's a moment of feeling like I'm brilliant, when everything I've been working on for the last month becomes perfectly clear. There's no ambiguity, no question that I might be wrong. I finally understand.

So the point of all this is that I'm either going to take math next quarter or do the DRP. It's OK, though, I'm not going to math grad school. I haven't gotten all nostalgic about classes. They suck.