An American Science Fiction author named Ted Chiang wrote a lauded series of short stories that were collected as Stories of Your Life and Others. His most notable story is "Story of Your Life" that was adapted into the film Arrival.

So after seeing and loving Arrival and seeing praise for Chiang's writing from authors I like I decided to pick up his short story collection. And I was unimpressed. Most of the stories struck me as oddly detached and cold. The stories are largely about weird logic puzzles. There's at least two where the protagonist becomes a super genius but grows so logical that he loses his human capacity for empathy. Not that the stories were bad, they're just not what I want from short stories. I read for drama, and melodrama, and pathos. And in a short story I tend to like lush, evocative prose.

Anyway, there were two that I really liked. In one an Elamite laborer is called to Babylon, for the Babylonians had built their tower all the way to the vault of Heaven, but need a special crew to tunnel through to Heaven. He tunnels through and climbs the last steps to Heaven only to find himself on Earth, several hundred miles from Babylon, having come up in a lake. He concludes that the Earth is not a sphere or flat sheet but actually a curved cylinder.

More relevant to the discussion at hand my favorite story of the bunch was about a Mathematics professor. In the story she discovers that, beyond a certain point, mathematics breaks down and has no relationship to material reality. And this revelation severely depresses her, because she thought that through mathematics she could, essentially, "solve" the universe. But the story is also about her strained marriage and also grieving a lost dream. I thought it was the least detached, the most emotional, of all the stories in the collection.

In conclusion, I hate that math is taught backwards. It wasn't until I took Trig and Calc II in college that they started to explain more about what all that algebra and lower-level calculus was actually about. And that was so many years ago that I forgot anyway. Why wasn't I ever taught mathematics theory? They made me memorize proofs at some point, but I didn't really understand what they meant so I forgot them. I don't know, maybe it's on me. Maybe if I'd been curious and actually just read the math textbooks on my own I would've learned theory. I did that for other subjects, sometimes. I guess I feel like my entire math education from grade school onwards, even my high school calc course, was all about rote memorization, which isn't a path to either curiosity or true understanding. Or it wasn't for me.