>>12103909Well what happens with me, is that often times my mind constructs these metaphors about the phenomena that I'm reading about, like say I'm reading some letters and each letter has a color in my imagination, so my mind constructs a story from those letters, it thinks about things that have such palette of colors in that background, and I begin associating those ideas with the ones of mathematics, that's one way, another way, imagination can be significantly more symbolic, for example, when I think about proofs often times I think about being face to face with the inner workings of some complicated device/mechanism/machine, of which its different parts if changed cause the system to behave differently, this is especially true when the proofs involve some "tricky" construction. Then comes the case that when one's thinking about these proofs or definitions one's able to see the whole, and these glimpses of totality that one wasn't able to see before give euphoric feelings and also the chills. On the other hand, when one starts to think about the implications of mathematics with respect to everything else, say when you're thinking about fractals in relation to relaity, it sometimes might feel like you're in the presence of infinity and it feels sublime, and you might think about its infinite variety and compare it to the diversity of nature or what have you. Then is the part of finding your own formalizations that say you're like investigating some problem based on this idea or metaphor that you have in your mind of how things are connected and it inspires to search more and more and eventually you find a way to actually represent the problems you're dealing with, and when that happens you end up making your own vocabulary and it goes ever more fluidly until it finally settles. Then there's also the part of mental movements, of how each part interlocks with the other, and that feels so satisfying. And then the elegant maths feels very powerful, etc.
