{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

Why the math videos, if we are bothered about nothing? You asked me that, I have been asking that to myself.
Well, its a little difficult to explain, I'd give it a try- I often imagine myself as a concentration camp inmate like Trachtenberg,a Russian Jew who narrowly escaped dying in one of the camps.Let me tell you his story to explain what I mean.
Part-1-
He was shipped in a cattle car to a concentration camp-one noted for its brutality. The slightest variance from the rules resulted in outrageous forms of punishment. Daily the ranks of the prison were decimated by the ruthlessly random selection of victims for the ovens.

To keep his sanity, Trachtenberg moved into a world of his own-a world of logic and order. While his body daily grew more emaciated, and all about him was pestilence, death, and destruction, his mind refused to accept defeat and followed paths of numbers that, at his bidding, performed miraculous feats.

He did not have books, paper, pen, or pencil. But his mind was equal to the challenge. Mathematics, he believed, was the key to precise thinking. In happier times, he had found it an excellent recreational outlet. In a world gone mad, the calm logic of numbers were like old friends. His mind, arranging and rearranging, found new ways of manipulating them.

He visualized gigantic numbers to be added and he set himself the task of totaling them. And since no one can remember thousands of numbers, he invented a fool-proof method that would make it possible for even a child to add thousands of numbers together without making a mistake-without, in fact, ever adding higher than eleven.

During his long years in the living hell of the concentration camp, every spare moment was spent on his simplified system of mathematics, devising shortcuts for everything from multiplication to algebra. The corruption and misery, the cries from clammy cells and torture chambers, the stench of ovens, the atrocities, and the constant threat of death, faded as he doggedly computed mathematical combinations-reckoning rules, proving and proving again, then starting over again to make the system even simpler.

The hardships acted as a spur to his genius. Lacking paper, he scribbled his theories on bits of wrapping paper, old envelopes, the back of carefully saved German worksheets. Because even these bits of paper were at a premium he worked everything in his head, putting down only the finished theories.

Think of me as Tratchenberg & the world as a big concentration camp.
Part-2
As A YOUNG SCAMP in my wild years, nothing had so grieved me as having been born at a time which obviously erected its Halls of Fame only to shopkeepers and government officials. The waves of historic events seemed to have grown so smooth that the future really seemed to belong only to the 'peaceful contest of nations'; in other words, a cozy mutual swindling match with the exclusion of violent methods of defense. The various nations began to be more and more like private citizens who cut the ground from under one another's feet, stealing each other's customers and orders, trying in every way to get ahead of one another, and staging this whole act amid a hue and cry as loud as it is harmless. This development seemed not only to endure but was expected in time (as was universally recommended) to remodel the whole world into one big department store in whose vestibules the busts of the shrewdest profiteers and the most lamblike administrative officials would be garnered for all eternity. The English could supply the merchants, the Germans the administrative officials, and the Jews no doubt would have to sacrifice themselves to being the owners, since by their own admission they never make any money, but always 'pay,' and, besides, speak the most languages.
 Why couldn't I have been born a hundred years earlier? Say at the time of the Wars of Liberation when a man, even without a 'business,' was really worth something?!


I could say the same thing about math -math has been turned into a mechanical,materialistic,spiritless discipline.No, to me math is not just something engineers use,but the doorway to Lovecraft's old ones.Also,unlike Trachtenberg's math,which wears a smiley face,mine wears Cthulhu's mask & yet I prefer it to saccharine fiction as it may be bitter,yet it’s the truth.

Oh,today I punched  these words into the search engine –Mathematics,bitter,truth,life,hate(all together).What did I find-lo & behold- Xhentric (blog).THIS IS NOT A COINCIDENCE.

(What I’ve written, did it make any sense to you? I am not sure it did to me ) I'd  miss you Mr H.