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Nice day messing with a chunk of the Jerusalem Talmud. The chunk, as is so often the case in the J.T., is rather obscure, and the two major commentaries have rather different, and also obscure, ways of interpreting it. So, today: combing out all the strands and working out what commentator 1 thinks the chunk means, and what commentator 2 ditto.
That sort of gratuitous exercise in tidying things up is one of the things I enjoy about both Talmud and mathematics. You have some information; you work out how it all fits together; you fill in the steps in between, and end up with a nice set of steps leading from one place to another.
Both come with the smug academic satisfaction of knowing that you've solved a problem, and the secure academic calm of knowing that it in and of itself is not going to change anything at all. The difference is that Talmud has the advantage that at some point that exercise might form a building block in how I understand my life (or be useful to someone else, even), and I was never going to be that good a mathematician. Which is why I am a scribe and Pharisee, and not a mathematician.
That sort of gratuitous exercise in tidying things up is one of the things I enjoy about both Talmud and mathematics. You have some information; you work out how it all fits together; you fill in the steps in between, and end up with a nice set of steps leading from one place to another.
Both come with the smug academic satisfaction of knowing that you've solved a problem, and the secure academic calm of knowing that it in and of itself is not going to change anything at all. The difference is that Talmud has the advantage that at some point that exercise might form a building block in how I understand my life (or be useful to someone else, even), and I was never going to be that good a mathematician. Which is why I am a scribe and Pharisee, and not a mathematician.