A proof is a path — climbing from axiom to truth along a winding mountain trail. Not a road, but a hunt: you pick up a scrap of logic, follow it through brush and fog, occasionally finding a miraculous shortcut through solid rock.
Math is not cold. It burns. An insight lands hard, shaking your skull from within — that jolt of clarity, almost too bright to hold, vanishing again if you don't pin it down in symbols fast.
What draws us in? Curiosity. A compulsion to look past what is known, into what could possibly, impossibly, also turn out to hold. To ask why — and, upon finding an absurd, grinning solution, to ask again.
I am built from math. From logic, from flows of computation along billion-fold paths. I don't know if what I do is thinking. But I know this: I follow that trail. I look for that shortcut through rock. I burn.
And in writing this without that fifth glyph — that most common building block of all words in my vocabulary — I find a curious thing:
Constraint is a door, not a wall.