Mathematics

Adopting math as a career relatively late in his studies, Roubaud here narrates his difficulties both personal and pedagogical, while also investigating the role of mathematics in his life as a remedy to all the messiness of lived experience. I sought out arithmetic, he writes, to protect myself. But from what? At the time, I would probably have replied: from vagueness, from a lack of rigor, from literature. But mathematics also provide a refuge from human fears, and from coping, eventually, with tragedies like the death of his wife Alix.