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The Mathematician
She was dead set on becoming a mathematician.
Not in any Sumerian sense for measuring plots of land, taxing the well-to-dos, nor charting the night sky, or developing calendars.
Though, from what she had read, they were pretty amazing, those Sumerians, their spot of earth between Euphrates and Tigris so fertile that between plantings and harvests, they now found the leisure time to start to THINK about things, and apparently this led to thinking about counting things which eventually led to God.
At least if Pythagoras is to be believed, who, taking a Sumerian cue, also found that everything in the universe could be reduced to numbers and who then concluded that the universe had in fact been built using mathematics. The truth behind everyday reality lies in numbers, he said.
She believed him.
Galileo went one step further to bravely state that Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe (no small assertion that) and that its grammar would explain all experimental results and even predict novel phenomena.
Ah, she thought, the language of God is not Latin, it’s math.
And if you were curious; if the big mysteries kept you awake at night: what better way to figure things out than to learn to…