"Um... think of it this way," she says. "Math is really just a pretty small set of pretty simple rules called axioms. All the interesting stuff like calculus and linear algebra, somebody had to figure out how to do, just based on those small simple rules. Mathematicians look at the rules, and everything that everybody else has already figured out about how they work, and they figure out new stuff from there. It's kind of like science, but with pure logic instead of the physical world."