Modern math is like a pyramid, and the broad fundament is often not fun. It is at the higher and apical levels of geometry, topology, analysis, number theory, and mathematical logic that the fun and profundity start, when the calculators and context-less formulae fall away and all that’s left are pencil and paper and what gets called “genius,” viz. the particular blend of reason and ecstatic creativity that characterizes what is best about the human mind.

David Foster Wallace in Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama (pdf)