Mostly people not like mathematics, they said,” Oh, it’s that really annoying boring thing”, or “Oh, it’s that really hard and complicated thing. I`m not talking about the same thing. In fact, if people think like that, they probably never experienced REAL mathematics.
What real mathematics is like
If people only experienced mathematics at school, they might think it starts with some boring formal definitions, then some boring formal algebra, followed by a boring formal proof, from which they get a mildly interesting result.
In reality, mathematics starts from the other end. It always starts with a riddle.
Here’s a riddle :
A farmer has a fox, a goose, and some cabbage. He wants to cross a river on his boat, but the boat is small, so he can only take one item with him at a time. He can’t leave the fox with the goose, or the goose with the cabbage, because the former would eat the latter. How can he cross the river?
The answer is quite simple, so I won’t even tell the answer. And the answer is where it would end for any normal human. But not for a mathematician. As mathematicians, after we enjoy the glowing feeling of having solved the riddle, we wonder what would happen in similar cases. Let’s say the genetically modified cabbage suddenly becomes conscious and decides it loves eating foxes. Is there still a solution?