# Strange Maths _Date: 2026-08-05_ ___ ## What is math horror? I like mathematical cosmic horror. I wish there were more of it, at least the way I'd like it focused. No summoning circles. Not even, necessarily, physical consequences which are "different" from our current intuition/understanding of physics. For example, I quite like the short story of an integer between 3 and 4, hidden by... well, Big Math (TM), I guess ("The Secret Number" by Igor Teper). But the physical consequence makes it slightly less horrific to me, ironically. That being said, I do like try to gaslight AI via absurd "counterpoints". For example, when it says something like "`3` is the unique integer between `2` and `4`", I ask it "are you sure it's unique, what about `3'`?". The CoT summary-clause for that was something along the lines of "Grappling with the uniqueness of 3". "Grappling"??? Haha. Quite good fun. But back to the horror aspect. Instead of "physics is different than we thought", the horror for me is realizing that reality really might have been one way rather than the (nicer, more convenient) other all along. Despite still being in line with known physics. "What if the `<conjecture>` Conjecture were false but it's provable that the counterexample is not constructible nor verifiable in relevant time scales (via physical processes)?" Now, *that* is cursed. Nothing has changed about the universe in terms of any strange behavior. It's just that it was always more annoying of a universe than we thought / would want it to be like. ...Is (my) cosmic horror just some annoyance with gravitas...? > "Yeah, our topos is annoying, like a grad student taking out their emotional issues on their simulated entities."