Wanderlust

It's amazing the things you find when you wander. Jennica, Andrew, and I set out this morning for Haus der Mathematik (the Mathematics House) quite far from where we were staying in the city center of Vienna. Andrew, a passionate math major, mentioned it and advertised it as a math museum, something we all considered rather interesting because there isn't much academically about the history of math and the people who developed the subject. Many stations by train later, we were wandering suburbs outside Vienna, pulling up the dropped pin on google maps every now and then to readjust our course.

It's not that Haus der Mathematik was a letdown; it simply wasn't what any of us had predicted. As our trio approached a post-secondary institution that seemed from its description to be a school to prepare adults outside of academia to be educators at the location of the pin, we understood that it was not as believed. All that there was for us of the Haus was a poster on the wall in the dark of the stairwell. We played ourselves.

The adventure wasn't a waste, however! The poster itself, conveniently written in English, featured more prominent mathematicians of history than I knew existed. I learned about the people I've been studying for my math minor myself.

After we left the Haus, we wandered around the town and stumbled upon a small Austrian ikea-style furniture store, an old orthodox church in the middle of the neighborhood around Troststraße, and back near the city center the smallest, highest building in the world. We wouldn't have found any of these if we weren't looking into the unknown, but that's part of what makes them special.