I do like numbers. Some of my favorite telephone conversations from my 20s and 30s were discussing graph theory and Riemann space with my father. I have two different collections of books on the history of math, one that belonged to a mathematics and physics majoring ex-boyfriend from undergrad, and the second a series of five books on the history of maths by century and millennia. From 19 til 25 almost every person I was involved with was a physicist or a virgo, and quite a few, both. Patterns.

I find numbers soothing at time but do not actually like to do math. I aced it through out academia, following in my father’s footsteps of scoring more than 100 on most tests. He graduated with a degree in math, I went the route of linguistics. Languages, however, are math, in my estimation. Most of them, anyway. But not all. Brasilian Portuguese is all imaginary numbers and swing states, for example.

162 is not math. It is a number, normal, not even complex. It does nothing for us, but mark, and in this case, it marks the number of days until my PhD thesis is due. As a number with that meaning, it feels really very large. As a number it does not imply distance but that is what this number is. It is not the scope of time in which I have to shove a certain amount of anything. It is stones on a path. 162 stones until I am required to fall off the edge, or more realistically, until I fling somewhere between 65,000 and 85,000 (not not more than 100,000) words off an edge, then wait a few months to argue their validity. I count only to the date of the fling.

My days revolve around collecting numbers. This morning I noted that I had 25027 words in the document that contains words for Part I. They are disordered, occasionally incorrect, and probably too self-discursive to please an overlord. But words they are.

I calculate and recalculate because there is something pleasing about the concrete structure. 51 days until my supervisor would like a complete draft. 82 days which feels more reasonable on the front side, but perhaps less on the back side. She would like me to have 90 days to edit before submission, and wants 14 days to review the 65,000-85,000 words that I give her and recommend things that need doing to enable the successful flinging.

Even though I have written 37,000 words I find most of them unlikable for one reason or another. I discount the count. I discount the discursion. I have channeled the sheer joy of a David Foster Wallace text which is 40% footnotes, though mine is currently 17% footnotes as I am unsure the patience of the interrogators who will exam the flung document. I do not make this easy for them nor for myself, but the tangential, circular, recirculating conceptual model with lyricality became a necessity. It was never the thesis itself that caused pain, but the academic-ese causes tics and twitching and I have no medication for this except for the footnote, indented fieldnote block, and an insistence that we are playing in a non-dualist reality in which what happens in the invisible not only does not stay there, but it is not a metaphor.

162 days. 75,000 words, let’s take the mean and also the median. I made that easy for us, now didn’t I? If I were to begin today (I am not, trust me, I am not telling you stories), for each of the 51 days I would need to produce 1471 words. Of reasonable quality. Quality, there is the 611st word of this entry and while they may be of reasonable quality they are topically incorrect and thus my word count for the day will require an increase of the orthogonal. Statistically speaking. Yet irrelevant. Do androids dream of R?

Today I shall send my supervisor 1158+866+747+1223+some subset of 25027. None shall be the words she wants. That is: Table of contents, not on current process, abstract, introduction, and the chaotic neutral Part I document.

I shall take on 161 and not make words towards the goal. Probably. This makes it harder to evenly calculate the words. When I began, I calculated by month and by week, then would subtract the words as they were written. This thesis is not about the number of words. The only number that matters, truly, is 100,000 which I am not allowed to go over. And 21 June 2026, the date of the flinging.

That does not mean that I do not daily peer at the number of words written, words per section, sections per part, parts per thesis, and decide if I am or I am not on a track that I approve of. At the end of any day, the numbers tick over, I awaken and do it again.

I cannot make my brain not calculate. When I was in business school, in a class of 75 students, when the teacher would step out for some time I would calculate the value lost of my tuition on his lack of attending to my education. I would calculate the cost per minute, assuming our tuition only went towards our teachers, which in the case of Columbia was certainly not the case, and how much each minute was worth.

It also calculates language. Languages are a bit like music and dance in my mind. Depending on which languages I am messing about with, different things happen. I used to dream in symphony, which was quite beautiful and it did not include visible math, but it was always there, underlying.

I took up meditating several decades ago, it makes the math controllable, so no, when we are chatting over a coffee, there is unlikely to be math or music or languages dancing in the background of my mind. Just me and you.

Thankfully the words don’t get used up, so even though I have taken a break from today and the cleaning up of the 25,000 words to a tidier 15,000 or 16,000, by creating 1066 (!) they are still there for the taking. I’d best go attend to them. They don’t clean themselves up. 162 isn’t so big, nor is 75,000 — not when it comes to words — so soon enough I’ll find some new numbers to let float about in the background. I already have a few in mind. 730, 60, 57, 7.2. Meaningful, purposeful. Looking forward to getting to those, actually. Zoom zoom.

Here is my favorite mathematical poem. Stanislaw Lem. Love and Tensor Algebra.

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane

Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,

Their indices bedecked from one to n

Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone

And every vector dreams of matrices.

Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:

It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space

Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.

Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,

We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I’ll grant thee random access to my heart,

Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love;

And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,

And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,

Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,

Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,

Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not – for what then shall remain?

Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,

A root or two, a torus and a node:

The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!

The product of our scalars is defined!

Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind

Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,

I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.

Bernoulli would have been content to die,

Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 ?!

We can come back to Schrodinger equations another day, I must get to the words.