mandelbrot

[helenic]

I was intending to spend the last two hours at lectures, but after all my carefully crafted resolutions I managed to talk myself out of the optional 9am Latin reading class at 8.45, and then on my way to Hellenistic Philosophy at 10am a cyclist shot horizontally across Silver Street completely without warning, crashed straight into me and slammed me off the road. I picked myself up in semi-shock and walked my bike, which was making increasingly more ominous grating sounds, back to college, trying to ignore the pain in my leg and absolutely furious that I was going to miss the one lecture I actually needed to go to today. I couldn't stop shaking, and ended up going to Iain's room for tea and hugs and reassurance that my bike wasn't broken forever - the wire holding the mudguard away from the wheel had been bent, and the handlebars pushed out of alignment, but that was easy to fix once we realised what was the matter.

Afterwards we curled up in his big chair while I drank my tea, and he showed me a fractals program he'd helped to write, ages ago; playing around with different sets and making them colour cycle. Maybe I was still feeling dazed but the movement and the patterns were almost hypnotic. Beautiful and inexplicable. He tried to explain it and although I understood everything he was saying in principle (apart from the imaginary numbers, but then I didn't do maths beyond GCSE) I just couldn't comprehend how something so complex and delicate could just be a graph of an equation; how Z=⁸√1 could become so aesthetic and extraordinary, simply by writing it down. Do mathematicians see something that wonderful just looking at the numbers? When I was eight I used to watch documentaries on Schroedinger's cat and want to be a quantum physicist. I suppose maths is like Greek in a way - learning the language of it can be too dull for words, but once you know it you can express things of unimaginable beauty.

I decided to swap syndicates in the end, for a number of reasons. The one I'm going to tell people is that Iain and I decided it would be unwise to live together; the real one is that, lovely as they are, Malcolm and Quiet Ian just aren't people I can imagine coming home to, people whose doors I could knock on at 11pm when I was lonely and just wanted a chat. Yesterday I went over to Kenny B when philosophy was killing my head and got caught up in a game of what we appropriately dubbed Crap Cricket; trying to whack a nearly-empty milk carton through open doors in the corridor with a rolled-up magazine, complete with extreme fielding on the part of the lads and over-exaggerated rage from anyone who was caught out (and we weren't even drunk). It deteriorated when Iain and Ian substituted the milk carton for a satsuma, but I haven't laughed so much in days, and made me realise just how much I needed to have people around me who are fun. I'm going to talk to Ed, Ruth and Richard today about being the fourth member of theirs, and Iain says he's happy to stay with Malcolm and Quiet Ian because he gets on well with them; they are nice guys, and maybe I'm picky in wanting more than that, but I'm so much happier with this that it's obvious it's the right thing to do.