The ti­tle is a quote from Juras­sic Park, if you were won­der­ing. A girl, chased by di­nosaurs, runs in­to a com­put­er, no­tices it's Unix, says "That's Unix! I know Unix!", and pro­ceeds to hack some­thing or oth­er that lets her es­cape the pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned di­nosaurs.

Well, that's how life of­ten feels for me, ex­cept with Math. And with­out di­nosaurs. I am sur­round­ed by trou­ble, some­thing is com­plete­ly bro­ken in a way I can't quite get, things feel just slight­ly weird... and sud­den­ly... that's math! I know math! (of course I don't know math, noone knows math. We all just know some math­).

I may see an ad and no­tice the huge dis­count is just a clev­er­ly dis­guised tiny dis­coun­t. A snip­pet of news may re­veal it­self as com­plete non­sense af­ter a cur­so­ry anal­y­sis. A for­ward­ed mail may be­come slight­ly more an­noy­ing be­cause of its ob­vi­ous stu­pid­i­ty. Be­cause of math.

Math is the tool I have to make sense of things. When the world gets con­fus­ing and scary, if it can be ex­pressed in num­ber­s, it calms me down. Afraid of the fu­ture? Let's con­sid­er the won­ders of com­pound in­ter­est. Scared of death? Well, look at prob­a­bil­i­ties. Need­ing a lit­tle ad­ven­ture? Well, there is game the­o­ry! Need a con­ver­sa­tion starter? You can men­tion you once spent time in class fig­ur­ing out the ho­meo­mor­phism that ex­plains the scene in Flash­dance where the welder re­moves her bra through her sleeve.

Math tells me the world is not per­fec­t. Math tells me the num­bers I see on my com­put­er are not re­al­ly re­al num­ber­s, and can't be trust­ed. Math tells me I can't cross all the bridges in Könis­gerg on­ly once. Math tells me the num­ber one is the most fre­quent num­ber in to­day's pa­per. Math tells me Pla­to was right and there is a uni­verse of pure ideas, and this is but a re­flec­tion.

On the oth­er hand, Math tells me I can cut an or­ange in­to a few pieces, which re­assem­ble in­to two, iden­ti­cal, or­anges. So take what she says with a grain of salt.