Imagine that you have woken from a dream, a dream brimming with meaning, with passion, with mystery. You try to sustain the feeling, recount the details, share the experience. You fail. Your powers of reconstruction are too meager, your tongue is too clumsy. Mathematics is such a dream, dreamed by individuals, personal, yet remarkably in a waking state, and provoking sufficient commonality in its recounting to bring individuals together to create a community of shared passion. The first dreamer of the dream, shrouded in history and myth, perhaps was Thales of Miletus, who later advised Pythagoras of Samos. Pythagoras subsequently founded an order of adherents holding knowledge and property in common while pursuing philosophical and mathematical studies as a moral basis for the conduct of life (Boyer & Merzbach, 2011).
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