 The value of the liberal arts
When I was l4 years old, I began a course in analytic geometry. I had always enjoyed mathematics and had appreciated its sensible techniques, but nothing had prepared me for what I was about to experience. The class began with the idea of analysis, the translation of lines and surfaces into numbers and letters, then plunged into the Pythagorean theorem. As the theorem was laid out before me, it suddenly occurred to me that I was not merely acquiring a bit of useful information—that if you squared the hypotenuse of a right triangle, it would equal the sum of the squares of the other two sides—but a piece of demonstrable truth. The power of that moment was such that it lingers with me to this day.
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