Aditya Bhargava's personal blog.

Community Service Mathematics is supposed to be a process of discovery. Definitions, propositions, and methods of proof don’t come from nowhere, although after the fact (when presented in a textbook) they often seem to. As opposed to a textbook, real maths is highly non-linear. It took mathematicians quite a lot of fuss to come up with the quadratic formula, and even simple geometric conjectures were for the longest time the subject of hot debate.