After a long hiatus, I am dusting off my blog and I’ve moved it here to a new home. While I was going through the process of transferring everything here, I re-read the very first post I ever wrote, called Wisdom from the Dodecahedron. And I also found my drawing of the Dodecahedron that the original banner on the very old blog site was based on.
The Dodecahedron is a character from The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, and he lives in Digitopolis, the city of numbers. Many people prize mathematics for its cool logic and want to hold it up as emotionless as if that somehow makes it better. But here is the first person we meet in Digitopolis and he has on display twelve emotions!
And that appeals to me a lot, because I find that maths is full of emotion. Frustration, curiosity, surprise, satisfaction, pride, sadness, companionship, wonder, silliness, joy — they’re all there, sometimes in quick succession. Talk to any mathematician about their work and those emotional words are guaranteed to spill out. We’re human, and humans feel emotions, and humans do maths in a human way, which is an emotional way.
The Dodecahedron reminds me to feel my emotions as I do maths, and to make space for others to do the same.