#old man with pointy hat and long white beard? call that my advisor

[dirichletttt]

I genuinely feel like math is like the closest thing we have to actual irl wizardry. It's an ancient field of study going back to the birth of civilization, and was actively studied by almost every civilization. It's an incredibly accurate tool for analyzing and predicting phenomena from the movement of galaxy clusters to the vibrations of quarks. But even beyond application, pure math is an impossibly deep field in and of itself, studied and passed down by hundreds of generations prior. You can even trace the connection of each mathematician to the ancients via the Mathematics Genealogy Project.

And we manipulate it with pen and paper. We make our own definitions, and follow their logical conclusions. There is no experimental evidence to adhere to. Nothing is handed down on high; you can really say anything that you want, it's just up to others to believe you. The notion that mathematics is just a set of rules to memorize is one of the worst things to come out of modern general education.

My point being, tell me that this isn't just the modern day version of a magical incantation: