... for math. I had a lively discussion with my brother this morning about Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. He asked me to explain the main concepts. I did my best. As he's quite mathematically adept, I urged him to read the book himself. My brother is a very creative thinker, and I suspect it would inspire him to have all sorts of interesting ideas ~ which I'd like to hear about later myself.

In the meantime, the New York Times reviews a book called Strange Matters by Tom Siegfried that sounds as if it might be up my street. It contains a sentence that sums up my Math Envy:

Finally, theoretical physics has become a refined form of creative play, in which testing out wacky ideas mathematically continually outruns experiment. Sometimes it outruns experiment so far the ideas are barely testable even in principle, but that doesn't stop it being enormous fun for those intellectually equipped to play the game. 2:47:42 PM