[ianmcgowan]

I love the mental picture from Greg Egan's Diaspora of the truth mines, literally hacking the math like chunks of coal:

"If ve ever wanted to be a miner in vis own right -- making and testing vis own conjectures at the coal face, like Gauss and Euler, Riemann and Levi-Civita, deRham and Cartan, Radiya and Blanca -- then Yatima knew there were no shortcuts, no alternatives to exploring the Mines firsthand. Ve couldn't hope to strike out in a fresh direction, a route no one had ever chosen before, without a new take on the old results. Only once ve'd constructed vis own map of the Mines -- idiosyncratically crumpled and stained, adorned and annotated like no one else's -- could ve begin to guess where the next rich vein of undiscovered truths lay buried."