Obsession
sciencepunk | June 23, 2010This is a story about how a simple puzzle ended up haunting me for over 20 years. It's a story of hubris blocked by a mountain of cold mathematics, and the obsession spawned by knowing an answer is out there, but not knowing how to find it.
Growing on a remote island, my youthful thirst for new reading material was quenched in regular bursts from the Scholastic catalogue, a thrilling piece of folded A3 paper that flaunted great collections of tremendously exciting tomes on everything from monsters to maths. The best were the ones that combined the two.
Popular at the time, these…