>>>Had a lot of abstractions in my studies. I'm a mathematician, so to understand those things, I had to develop quite an extensive skill in abstract thinking. Not that it required any faith - it was all on condition, "if we assume these axioms and the logic to be valid, then this has these properties".
>>>
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>>Through high school I was "good in math." All A's, advanced placement, etc. Then I hit freshman year college calculus and it all collapsed. I mention only in passing that the course was taught by Prof. Alexandra Bellow, Saul Bellow's wife at the time. Every guy in the class had Mrs. Robinson fantasies about her. She was Romanian. One morning she came into the classroom and said you can all go home, I am too excited to teach, my husband just won the Nobel Prize. The penny dropped -- Bellow, got it. Believe it or not, I never even suspected until then. She was just one hell of a hot math professor. For the record, she went down in history as Mrs. Bellow #3, or maybe it was #4.
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>>Where advanced math lost me was i. The square root of -1. Riddle me that, joker. I had a long discussion with a math prof -- not Alexandra Bellow, sadly -- who said I know it doesn't seem to make sense, but it makes possible a great number of elegant proofs. Oh. Kay.
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>Hey! Looks like she's Miss May of something!
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>http://matematica.uni-bocconi.it/calendario/calendario2005.htm
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><g>


That is TOO funny!

It isn't even a particularly good picture of her, but you get the idea.

"The babes of math" -- still laughing....