In a beautiful essay published in Waiting for God, Simone Weil reminds us that study serves to develop attention, and almost no matter what is studied, even a mathematical exercise that turns out to be incomprehensible is fine. “Without feeling or knowing it,” Weil writes, “that seemingly sterile and fruitless effort has brought more light into the soul. One day one will find the fruit of it (…) in any sphere of intelligence, perhaps entirely unrelated to mathematics.”

– Alice Rohrwacher 🇮🇹