[ajratner]

The grouping of theoretical, 'QED' style math with music and football is interesting to think about. I think football and math go together and can be seen as inverse processes wrt to music. Both football and theoretical math have you start with arbitrary rules or principles and then build up a system, add extrapolated layers of complexity on top of that. The top layers recreate the world building up from that core set of assumptions.

Music on the other hand can be seen, at its most elegant, as taking the complexity of the world and reducing it or rather tying it together, coalescing it into patterns, rhythms, and other things that approach the simplicity and fundamental nature of what one starts out with math, or at least the earliest lemmas of a mathematical system.

I think both are intensely pleasurable activities in their own way because they let you trace this path from fundamentals to complexity and back. Math and football as challenges that have you climb up the mountain of complexity, but that still remain close enough to the base to be simple and absolute and beautiful in these ways; and music as an initially complex and tumultuous thing that gets rid of just enough entropy to be simpler but not fake.