DEFINITION OF ZERO AND ONE

I was so bored in high school I couldn't stand it.
(I was a little wild when not forced to sit in a classroom.)
I would skip as many days as I could get away with
and go to the library and study what I wanted to.
I was reading as many as seven books at a time
looking for real knowledge.
I read all the Greeks and then the Romans..
then the existentialists..
the words were there but the light that was coming out
was full of uncertainty and only raised more questions than gave answers.
Then I read mythology. Something made sense in mythology.
Reincarnation. Higher beings. But still it was phantasmagoria.
I had a distinct feeling that I was living
a kind of "Paradise Lost" and I had to find it again.

By the time I was in the senior year I couldn't even sit in the class rooms.
I was headed for college. A private girls' school in Boston.
Here... I was certain...I would find real knowledge.
I could hardly wait.

Such a terrible disappointment. Simply more "training."
More memorizing and regurgitating.
No real knowledge. None of the teachers had any real knowledge.
Just more training. Like training monkeys to typewrite.

I approached my Greek professor whom I respected.
He was from Ethiopia and carried himself like a cultured person.
I asked him if he could tell me what the goal of life was.
He thought for while and answered very honestly.
"I ask myself that same question. I have everything, tenure, a house, beautiful wife, children. I am successful. But because I do not know the answer to that question sometimes I want to kill myself."

It was Vietnam and discontent with everything
was everywhere for my generation.
If it was difficult to sit in classrooms in high school,
it was impossible to do it in college.
I hardly ever opened a book and still I was a B and C student with recommendations for graduate school.
My major was mathematics.
I found peace and harmony and a kind of truth there.
Whenever this then always that. It was law.
It was always true within the mathematical world. I loved the security.
A pure science. All the sciences depended on mathematics.

All the way through to 3rd semester fourth year... somehow, ...
advanced calculus 4, advanced trigonometry, advanced geometry,
and then I was hit with abstract algebra and set theory.
Oddly enough the classes were taught by an Indian woman, Mrs. Rohatgi. She talked so fast and with such a thick accent
I really couldn't understand one word she was saying.
It was nightmare. Here was mathematics that I didn't understand.
It only got worse and worse. I was completely lost in the class
and she was impossible for me to communicate with.
I simply couldn't understand her when she talked.
(Of course the psychedelics I was taking didn't help much either.)

The last straw was when the principle of
generation of integers was discussed.
When it was presented that all integers are generated from the set of (0,1)
I thought I'd found something to hold onto.
Here was something secure.......
and then we turned the page....and there it was in bold type.
"0 and 1 are given. They are not defined and cannot be defined."
I had a nervous breakdown. I'm sure that was what happened.

It flashed before me:
All sciences, theoretical as well as applied
were connected to mathematics.
Mathematics meant manipulating integers.
All integers were generated from 0 and 1 and they could not be defined?
The bridges, buildings, highways, space ships,
all the concrete solid things we see around us
are built using mathematics and the basis of mathematics cannot be defined?

That was it. I quit college 3 weeks before graduation.
I needed to find that "definition" that everything was built on.