Imagine a world unconstrained by the limitations of reality, where the boundaries are set only by one’s imagination. This world has no geographic location, but exists, rather, in the collection of knowledge, thoughts, and ideas suspended throughout the gooey brain matter of my occipital cortex. Every time my fingers wrap around a pencil, something from this world acquires a form perceptible to human eyes. Visualizing this world does not require some sort of neurological imaging software; it takes merely an examination of the countless scribbles straddling the margins of any notebook of mine.
Like many high school students, I often find myself mindlessly releasing suppressed imagination through cursory pencil illustrations in my notebook. Unlike most high school students, however, I take pride in every single one of my creations – every figure, character, object, contraption, or indecipherable mass of scribbled lines – regardless of how trivial or meaningless it might initially appear. Sometimes I flip through the pages of an old notebook for the sole purpose of observing the unending series of sketches looming in the margins, and often I can perfectly recollect the exact moment an idea first entered my imagination. I recall one example from my United States history notebook: upon learning President Dwight D Eisenhower ordered the racial integration of Little Rock High School in 1956, a spark of mathematical wit ignited, and now on that very page you can find the clever sketch of our thirty-fourth president affixing a Leibniz integration operator to a small boulder-like object labeled “High School.” However, the origins for some – such as the six-armed wizard in my eighth grade Italian binder or the winged elephant dancing in the margins of my chemistry notes – are not quite certain. Although most people might consider