Duality

Hey hey hey and welcome to another episode of How To Survive a Maths Degree! I'm your disquietingly dapper droll, Duality!

I'm sure all of you already know the objectives of attempting such a bohemian subject. Learn numbers, enhance your mental ability, write groundbreaking papers on the nature of logic itself, survive the tenurewolves, all textbook stuff. However, it is few indeed who escape out the other side of university with their mental and physical integrity, mostly due to the terrible dearth of terrible-death-avoiding knowledge among the undergraduate rabble. Fortuitously for your fine selves, Dr Duality is here to help!

First rule of all maths degrees is coffee. Drink it with a teabag and tiny marshmallows. Anything less will provoke the Elder Ones. Exsanguination-flavoured bubble tea is also acceptable if you don't mind the premonitory hallucinations.

Second rule of maths degrees: You may define exponentiation however you choose. Multiplication may also be tampered with if suitable precautions are taken. Messing with the formal basis of addition, on the other hand, invariably enrages Causality herself and results in a janitor's nightmare worth of shredded organ puddles. This is generally not advised due to the resultant slip hazard.

Third rule of maths degrees: Do not let the number 17 out of your sight. It will escape.

Fourth rule of maths degrees: You just let it out of your sight. You incompetent urelement. Go and get a butterfly net and catch it before the number line caves in.

Fifth rule of maths degrees: You may look down on all other fields of study for 'being too applied' and 'falling short of the heart of reality' and 'is dum n stupd'. Philosophy does not count as a field of study due to not involving numbers. Numbers are perfection. Numbers are eternal. Numbers are the highest object of thought. It is legal to murder heretics.

Sixth rule of maths degrees: Don't put anything in the empty set or set theory will break again.

Seventh rule of maths degrees: Primes are evil. Infinities are evil. Diophantine equations are extra evil.

Eighth rule of maths degrees: 'Have you ever heard a pickup line about pickup lines? I've never meta girl who had.' is the only acceptable means of securing meiotic reproduction among mathematicians. Mitosis is hence the conventional method of propagating our genes.

Ninth rule of maths degrees: This is left as an exercise to the reader.

Tenth rule of maths degrees: The clocks go to thirteen in the maths department. Use the extra hours wisely.

Sixteenth rule of maths degrees: Rigorous ordinal succession requirements on rulesets are optional.

Seventeenth rule of maths degrees: IT ESCAPED AGAIN YOU FOOL GO GET IT

Eighteenth rule of maths degrees: The contents of these rules are 73% arbitrarily generated, 24% somewhat nonspecific, and have 59% less apparent ground in empirical reality than linguistics. This is either universal in mathematics or not at all universal in mathematics, depending on your philosophy. If you have a philosophy it is legal for us to murder you as a heretic.

Anyway welcome to university if you wish to escape you must either pay off a student debt larger than the national deficit or solve maths forever and become as a god among mortals