I still remember the realization in college at Flinders University in Australia that mathematics was not just an abstract game of symbols but could be used as a tool to analyze and understand the modern world.
Terence TaoRead
When you're concentrating hard, hours can fly by, and it's just you and a math problem.
Interpretation
Focus can make time feel fleeting while engaging with challenging tasks.
This quote highlights the unique experience of deep concentration, especially in the context of solving complex problems. It suggests that when one is fully immersed in an intellectually demanding activity, such as mathematics, the passage of time becomes irrelevant, replaced by a sense of connection between the individual and the challenge at hand.
In practice
During a seminar on the importance of focus in problem-solving.
I still remember the realization in college at Flinders University in Australia that mathematics was not just an abstract game of symbols but could be used as a tool to analyze and understand the modern world.
Most students who take math classes aren't going to be mathematicians. They're going to be engineers, statisticians - in many ways, that's the more important mission of math education.
For me, I guess the main motivation is the satisfaction of finally understanding some tricky mathematical concept or phenomenon and then explaining it to others.
One can think of any given axiom system as being like a computer with a certain limited amount of memory or processing power. One could switch to a computer with even more storage, but no matter how large an amount of storage space the computer has, there will still exist some tasks that are beyond its ability.
I recall being fascinated by numbers even at age three and viewed their manipulation as a kind of game.
Talent is important, but how one develops and nurtures it is even more so.
Perhaps wisdom is simply a matter of waiting, and healing a question of time. And anything good you've ever been given is yours forever.
The jealous man is so preoccupied with what he hasn't got that he fails to appreciate the value of what he has got. He loses the ability to feel glad because the sun is shining. He doesn't see the wonder and the newness of the beginning of spring.
Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.
People think meditation is a huge undertaking. Don't think of it like that.
The limits of pleasure are as yet neither known nor fixed, and that we have no idea what degree of bodily bliss we are capable of attaining.
Do your work, but do your thing.
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