Man, why is it that reading pretty much any page on MathWorld leads to an immediate feeling of inadequacy and stupidity? It's like someone going way overboard with one of those jokes where they make up technical-sounding words to ridicule the concept of jargon. Except it's all real:

In many cases, the Hausdorff dimension correctly describes the correction term for a resonator with fractal perimeter in Lorentz's conjecture. However, in general, the proper dimension to use turns out to be the Minkowski-Bouligand dimension (Schroeder 1991).

I tend to feel I'm relatively well educated, but reading things on that website makes me feel like an six-year-old stumbling across his older brother's Calculus textbook. I felt the same way watching A Beautiful Mind. I'm so in awe of mathematicians. I can't imagine being conversant in all of those terms and knowing what to do with them. But I'd like to be.

For a minute, I was wishing I had taken more advanced math classes in college. But then I realized that all the knowledge I desire is right there in the aforementioned MathWorld site. I just have to find a chink in the armor, some entry point that isn't leagues over my head, which I can absorb and then use that knowledge to learn the next subject. Little by little, I can make my way around the site, devouring it from the inside out like a worm eating an apple. A math apple.

The weird thing is, advanced math isn't even a major interest of mine. That is, I find it interesting, but it isn't one of those things I'm passionate about and driven to read about in my spare time. Which is precisely why I didn't take more math-oriented classes in college. In fact, I switched majors from Computer Engineering to Computer Science because there was less high math required. So it's not that I long to study advanced math and have been denied the opportunity. I think it's more like a hopeless desire to know everything. I don't like not understanding things.

However, I also don't like studying. So we'll have to see if my desire to put one more thing under my belt will be strong enough to overpower my laziness. It is a formidable foe, and mighty opponents have fallen to its immutable stubbornness in the past.