How to Bake Pi

My friend’s wisdom was a type of abstraction, abstracting heartbreak down to its very essence. Abstraction can appear to take you further and further away from reality, but really you’re getting closer and closer to the heart of the matter. To get to the heart, you have to strip away clothes and skin and flesh and bone.

‘It’s very simple really. You’ve lost something you loved.’

maths is defined by the techniques it uses to study things,

First you have to turn the reality into an abstraction. Then you do your logical reasoning in the abstract world. Then finally you have to turn that back into reality again. Different people are good at different parts of this process. But really the key part is being able to move back and forth between the abstract and the real.

inaccuracy of the final answer comes from a small percentage possibility that your hypothesis was wrong despite the evidence.

People started realising that those techniques could be used to study other things.

That’s why it’s so important when teaching maths to understand the student’s way of thinking, and point out what was wrong with their logic, not just what was wrong with their final answer.

Mathematics is different. The first step is the same – you start with a hypothesis that you think might be true for some reason. But instead of testing it rigorously using evidence, you test it rigorously using logic.

to a branch of mathematics called ‘topology’, which studies the shapes of things.