I don’t know his last name. He has significant Autism (I didn’t catch the details when he told me about it, it was some specific type). I met him on Saturday, while trying to make some ground on a math project at my favorite cafe. I pulled out a book, and he couldn’t help but notice the publisher (good ‘ol Springer-Verlag…they’re the primary publisher of math texts, and they nigh always bind with a signature yellow cover), so he asked me what I was working on, and we proceeded to talk about math for a while.

It turns out, he was an undergraduate some time ago, fell in love with math, and tried but did not succeed at grad school. That doesn’t stop him, however, from wrangling the craziest math the world currently has to offer.

I have a lot on my mind about that all, but unfortunately I have much schoolwork to do this evening, so I’ll quickly detail what bits of our conversation

1. “See, here’s the problem I think happens all to much in mathematical research. I like to describe it with an analogy that makes sense to me. It is like walking through a forest…you always watch the ground so you always know how to take your next step. Sadly than, we never really have a sense of where we are or where we’re going.”

2. He described Langlands Program to me: what it is, why it came to be, and how it fits into the broad context of mathematics as a whole. Not only that, it didn’t even take him long to explain it. Here’s the crazy part: it made sense. Only for a fleeting yet positively shimmering  moment. Whoa. WHOA.