I have read somewhere that the weird names of IKEA furniture started because IKEA's founder is dyslexic and mixed up the different categories of furniture. If all rugs are Danish place names, then it's easier to know when you are talking about rugs. No source though.

I wonder what the equivalent of that last metaphor is in other languages. In my language it is also some reference to my head being attached to me.

A professor once told me that if you can delay a problem infinitely, then it is not a problem. At the time, he was referencing a mathematical limit problem, but it has stuck with me as a piece of general advice, for better or for worse.

In Dutch it's simply "ouder", meaning "older".

The existence of absolute cinema implies the existence of positive and negative cinema. The use of the term seems to show that we don't care about the direction of cinemaness, but merely about its intensity. We want cinema to be hugely positive or hugely negative, anything but mediocracy.

I'm going to echo your point here, but want to share my experience.

I study maths and tutor ~16 year olds. Some students think that if they haven't memorised the solution method for a maths problem, then they can't solve the problem.

This mindset is very bad and can be very hard to break.

As you might have noticed, this is something I am very passionate about. So thank you all for this episode. Hopefully this will help people realise that maths is more than what you are taught in school. Please feel free to contact me if you ever need more convincing that maths is fun.

Currently, I have listened to Tom's topic on psychology of maths and started Ella's topic on sudoku. The realizations you have already made about how maths is more than the dreadful statistics shoved through your mouth are wonderful to listen to. I hope this continues through the sudoku topic.

Maths is so much more than numbers, arithmetic, calculus and statistics. To me it is more about reasoning in general, about what we can guarantee to be true given certain conditions hold. Numbers and calculus and the like are simply the tools we have developed to make oir statements more general.

Hey, I am the guy who asked about maths in the q&a. It seems you have already started seeing maths through a different lens. It always pains me to hear people talk about how much they dread maths, especially when their experience with and view of the subject is limited to mandatory classes.