secret worlds
Hi there newsletter-ers,
I wrote a thing a few months ago that made me feel more alive (work-wise) than I had in almost a year. It was about the discovery of three very long integers that, when raised to the third power, improbably add up to equal 33.
Here they are:
(8,866,128,975,287,528)³ + (–8,778,405,442,862,239)³ + (–2,736,111,468,807,040)³ = 33
Why this matters to mathematicians is more interesting than the finding itself—even they admitted to me that the finding, on its own, is pointless. I loved losing myself in the process of unpuzzling why they gave a heck.
For the answer, you'll have to read the piece. But here's a short version:
That deeply resonates with me. And I think it’s why writing the piece made me feel so alive: I got to make contact with a secret world—and experience surprised recognition at what was there.
Kind of like this:
But I don’t think I conveyed that feeling in the actual article. Which means you, the reader, didn’t get to go where I got to go. My editor and I worked hard to distill the “hard” stuff into a sensical, sensible package—we successfully explained it. But I still think we left something important out.
So here’s a paragraph from my unreleased "director's cut" of the article. It's the part where I stopped explaining and just tried to capture a feeling of making contact with that secret world:
I'm not sure if it works for you. (Feel free to let me know by replying.) But now I can at least say I tried.
Have a great summer,
John