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Blast into Math! Pure mathematics: the proof of the pudding is in the eating

2 Pure mathematics: the proof of

the pudding is in the eating

The saying “the proof of the pudding is in the eating” was popularized by Cervantes in Don Quixote in
1605.It means that you won’t know whether or not you like something until you have tried it. The saying

is also true for mathematics: you won’t know whether or not you like a certain type of mathematics

until you’ve tried it.

Mathematics and language may seem different, but they share much in common. For example, the
patterns and grammatical structures in language are mathematical. But a language is much more than
just its words and grammar; there is art and beauty in language. Each distinct language has a distinct
character, like a flavor you can taste when you speak it. Pure mathematics has a similar aesthetic quality,
and the different mathematical subjects each have a different character or flavor, even though they are all
fundamentally connected. Over the course of this book, you will experience and taste two different areas

of mathematics: number theory and analysis. Although number theory and analysis have very different
mathematical flavors, you’ll see by the end of this book that they nonetheless complement each other.

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