The Learned Philosopher delves into the world of numbers
Chapter 1: What should I do Today?
“Oh, I’m so bored and bored,” mused the learned philosopher on a particularly cloudy Wednesday. The still, wintry oaks slept outside his book-laden home. Shakespeare slumbered heavily against Milton on his fireplace mantle, while Kant leaned lazily on the back of Hume. The robins quietly and discreetly flew to work, not even bothering to tweet or chirp. “ Perhaps,” he thought again, “ today I will study some Mathematics; yes perhaps today is a day for integration of continuous functions, the very lifeblood of excitement.” So the learned philosopher strolled from his turquoise couch, slouching and hunching, deciding now to amble, then to skip, made the mere 5m distance to his olden desk in an approximate ten seconds, a new record for the current winter.
On his desk lay a multitude of scattered papers. A few of them bore the indelible mark of his atrocious handwriting, a sloppy porridge of linguistic meaning only scrutable to himself and his tortured teachers from high school, who were forced to mark his work for what seemed like an eternity of practicing Egyptology. Here was a love poem of his entitled: “You are ,my love, with a 95% confidence interval, sexy.” Here was another: “Curves of the feminine set, yes please.”
Besides for his mother no one had read them. Besides for him no one had admired them. The rest of the writings were complete gibberish; a few theories on metaphysics written in a manic state of great inspiration but without much logic.
The learned philosopher sat down and started to integrate intensely. “Y=2x integrated becomes Y=X² + C , yes beautiful and I didn’t even forget the C that cheeky, elusive cunt. Y=X² integrated becomes Y=⅓ X³+C even more beautiful you devilish math god.” And so the philosopher continued, rambling to himself and congratulating himself gratuitously as he solved basic equations. He went further and further into the realm of numbers and ideas, pushing himself, pushing the bounds of stable reality, pushing the limits ( to clarify: in a non calculus definite sense) pushing sanity itself that all of a sudden and without much warning, and with much fault on behalf of the author of this text, a mystical portal, glowy azure and smoky, ripped open from his A4 page and sucked him, as like an overeager vacuum-cleaner, into the magical world of numbers.