Arthur C Clarke would like a word.

To us as a species just barely out of the African steppes and valleys, it registers as some sort of secular magic, is like being mesmerized by a kaleidoscope or being at the center of a room full of mirrors.

To pull out extra dimensions from math, and be able to see how the tips of our new lines wave about. To zoom in on the Mandelbrot Set. To consider infinities nested within infinities. To see how Pi literally goes on forever. To notice how Pi seems to pop up nearly everywhere, including where it wasn't expected. To see prime numbers go in outward spirals and making intricate patterns that seem to comply with the golden ratio.

This is all very poetic, too. Maybe the purest kind of art. Surely the most rigorously rational, coming up with utterly unexpected and surprising structures, beyond our ability to imagine just with our senses at play.

I wasn't sure if Feynman Diagrams.

So Maths is just like Dark Souls? You should put that on the box.

It used to get recommended all over Stack Overflow, but I did really love reading Göedel Escher Bach. That book taught me to see math as a game or, equivalently, as purely exercises in shuffling symbols around, with intent.

That shift in outlook really unlocked the fun in math for me. I learned about category theory through Haskell shortly after, and got into number systems and the surreal numbers and quaternions after that. There's so much neat math out there that the wall of calculus and linear alg really imposes right before all the good stuff.