You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

I think if we're lucky, we get to have a few big loves in our lifetime.

The kind of love that makes you zone out in conversations and keeps you up at night.

And if you're like me, when you love something or someone, it feels like there are reminders

of them everywhere.

For Dr. Eugenia Cheng, one of those big loves was, and still is, math.

Everywhere I look, I see math, everything I think about, I see math.

And I think that once you've gone through a certain amount of training and practice of

your brain thinking in certain ways, it just does that all the time.

And so I think that I see patterns and structures, and I think it's partly just having a very

broad notion of what math is.

Eugenia is a mathematician and author of the new book Is Math Real, how simple questions

lead us to mathematics deepest truths.

Throughout the book, she invites us to see that math is more than just getting the right

answer, or arriving at a single conclusion.

The beauty of math is that it's all about questions and curiosity.

It's about wondering why things are happening.

I am really like one of those toddlers who just keeps asking why forever and never stops.

Fundamentally, I just want to understand why things are going on.

And every explanation I find, or come up with, pushes me to ask why that is true.

Eugenia, like me, likes to test the limits of things.

See what the rules reveal.

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