From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-09-22:
"When I left the boxed township of Illinois farmland where I grew up to attend my dad's alma mater in the lurid, jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I right away developed a jones for mathematics. I'm starting to see why this was so. College math evokes a Midwesterner's sickness for home. I'd grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids--and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed flatland that sits and spins atop plates. I could plot by eye the area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky way before I came to know anything as formal as integrals or rates of change. Calculus was, quite literally, child's play." -- David Foster Wallace, in his memoir Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes: A Midwestern boyhood. Wallace died on September 12, 2008.
(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)