never, we're too clever to be taken down clown. for real, when this song came out, i thought the new kids were saying "gangs, gangs, gangs." it was only later did i realize that the thought of five boy band members making a song about gangs was ridiculous. once again, i feel like my fob-dom disadvantaged me.



i'm reading the book version of "a beautiful mind" and it's quite excellent. after the movie version with the bodacious jennifer connelly and the less bodacious russell crowe, john forbes nash jr was thrust once again into the popular conscience. the movie was good but the book is incredible. it surveys the life of nash and how he went from a genius at princeton, to a schizophrenic mess, to a nobel prize winner. the book is largely biographical and concentrates more on nash's life but it does go into some basic depth about what nash was doing in his genius days.



the way the book is written, it seems like nash just got these flashes of insight that led to his groundbreaking mathematical ideas. this is not arithmetic or calculus BC, this is serious math stuff. and as i read it, i'm trying to get even a glimpse of what they are talking about. i can't. the beauty of the writing is such that the concepts are explained well and the ideas are basic enough to not take away from the flow of the book. but when you stop to think about what nash and his contemporaries were doing, it's mind boggling.



someone came up with all those economic, engineering, physics, game theory, math rules that we use in our classes. geniuses came up with them in fact. and to read about someone's brain in action at such a high level is at once humbling and exciting. these eccentric crazy men are supremely rational and intelligent on one hand and totally inept (socially) on the other. but from them comes the real progress of civilization. they are breaking down models for how things work. i would like to, for just a few hours, sit down and listen to some genius mathematician explain some concept that he is trying to prove. it's on a level so far over my head that it would be exciting just to get confused.



people say that math is useless past the high school level. or rather, that's what i would say. i mean, how often are you using calculus or even algebra? i can barely recall my multiplication tables anymore. we were sitting in the back of hong's car a few weekends ago, looking through his old calculus book (he uses it to woo women), and we couldn't even do a simple x and y-intercept problem from page thirteen. how sad is that? i'm oft inclined to write off math as useless. but fundamentally it's the only thing that really matters. i need someone really really really smart to explain some shit to me. is there an "abstract mathematics for dummies" book or something?