As I already explained in this post, I always keep going back to the same bar or café. While in high school, that place was El Comercio, next to where we lived. Later, whenever I was back home for some days, I still spent hour after hour there. I read a lot of books and wrote a bunch of papers there. I had enormous amounts of coffee and orange juice. For pinchos and beer, I usually went elsewhere. Anyway, El Comercio served as my office. Most of the time I sat alone, with the occasional visit from my mother. My mother’s visits were invariably very short. She is not the kind of person who tires her derriere sitting in a café. She does not have the Sitzfleisch, and I will not be far off with the claim that I spent in any given week more time in El Comercio than she did in cafés in a whole year.

Why do I talk about El Comercio? As I still do, I read at the time a lot of history books. The guy who worked in El Comercio kept coming to check them out. He had been a history major. I liked him, and I liked hanging out there, but he is the reason why I didn’t study history. I definitely didn’t want to spend five years at university to end up a barman. Although some part of me definitely sees the romantic aspect of that, the petit bourgeois side was at the time dominant. To be honest, it still is. Anyway, I have often thought that, had I been rich, I would have studied history.

How does it come that I picked math instead? While in high school, I had absolutely no interest in math. Math was easy, but my parents were both mathematicians, and that was definitely off-putting. I liked bridges and boats, and with history being demoted to a hobby, I wanted to be an engineer. That was the plan as late as June of my high school senior year. When a few months earlier I had asked for course information and such at different universities, it was only in engineering schools. But then I had a vision. Okay, actually what happened is that it occurred to me that to build bridges I would probably need to know something about materials. And that materials sounded uncomfortably close to chemistry. Chemistry was the dealbreaker. If no bridges, then what? Math was the easiest way out. My father didn’t want me to study math because he thought—with very good arguments, if you ask me—that I was going there without any real interest. My mother was neutral, as she so often is, but I remember making her promise to me that it was true that if you studied math, then you could do something other than the weird shit they did, like working for a bank or something. She promised, and math it was. Now, after about a week at the university, I loved it.

In hindsight, it would have been a catastrophe for me to study history. First, although I am lazy and not very talented, I am a decent mathematician. I would have been a pretty miserable historian. Languages would have been a huge hurdle. At the time, I was mostly interested in medieval history, Byzantine history, the Crusades, but I never learned anything like Latin or Greek. And if there was something I disliked more than chemistry, it was languages. Then, although I like reading abstruse history books, I am not sure how much I would have enjoyed having to do it for a living. Or even for five years, having to write papers at the end. In contrast, the way of thinking in math feels kind of natural to me. But it is not only that. While I like seeing math in the real world, feeling a bit of a sense of marvel every time it happens, I enjoy the solipsistic nature of research in math. While I think that math is important, that math literacy is important—as I put it to the being, if she does not know her way with numbers, it will be super easy for me to cheat her—this is not what one is thinking about while doing research. At least I don’t. To me, it feels that I am playing a game against myself. A game where there are a few permanent rules, but where I am pretty much free to create the scenario I want to play at the moment.

I never got into chess. Neither into Go, although that game feels much more like something for me. But not chess. Chess is too rigid, and one has to think too much. Evidently, I know a bunch of mathematicians who play chess—some at a very high level, it seems—but I will never understand that. Chess feels too much like a math problem. Without the enormous freedom of math. In chess, you cannot decide—or at least it is not done—to play on a 10-by-10 grid, or to exchange your knights for two additional rooks. In math, one does that all the time. But not only does chess feel like math without the myriad of possibilities to design your own scenario, but you are also not being paid for it. Why would I spend my mental energy on that? If I were not a mathematician, I maybe would. But as a mathematician? No way. Reading in the bathtub, hiking, obsessing about trees, cooking, learning to play the drums, rock climbing, spending hours on Netflix, playing FIFA, crocheting… all of that makes sense to me because thinking about math is hard, tires the brain, and one needs something else. But chess? As tiring as math. Less fun. No money. I am sure that if there are any chess players out there, they would disagree, but said from this side of the road, get a life.

Okay, that last sentence was provocative—and it was meant to be—and you might be thinking that who should be getting a life here is the guy who spends his free time reading about antique boats and writing text for the internet void. You probably have a point, but since there is no comment section here, you would need your own blog to make it.