PREFACE
PREFACE
Science: The Grand Epic
o Heroic quest narrative—brave explorers (Newton, Einstein, Hawking) battling chaos, slaying dragons (uncertainty, entropy), forging laws from the void.
🔮 Philosophy: The Tragic Saga
Doomed protagonists (Socrates’ gadfly, Descartes’ doubt, Nietzsche’s hammer) wrestling fate, hubris, absurdity

Mathematics appears as a divine poem: formally exquisite, internally compelling, but grounded in axioms about sets, infinities, and constructions that are, on Dean’s reading, metaphysical posits rather than discoveries. Cantorian infinity, ZFC, and higher set theory become stylistic choices in an abstract lyric tradition, not windows into how the cosmos must be
Mathematics: The Divine Poem