One way and another, starting in my senior year in college, I spent a year or so in that dark basement. The most intense time was in a course in axiomatic set

One way and another, starting in my senior year in college, I spent a year or so in that dark basement. The most intense time was in a course in axiomatic set theory in an NSF summer math program at Vanderbilt. The next fall, I was in a course in real analysis, and the prof started with foundations. After the first test he wanted to "see me". The exercises on the test were all trivial except one, and I got it only in the last minute or so so wrote quickly. I used little omega for the ordinal of the natural numbers without defining it. I told him that from the course I'd taken the previous summer I thought that that was standard notation. Apparently he didn't know that. After my explanation, he saw that my solution was correct and one step shorter than his. Then I asked him what he wanted to "see me" about, and he said "Now, nothing.". Gads. I got my Ph.D. later from a better program at another university. Occasionally later I touched on that material. That was all. No way did I spend or want to spend 10 years in that basement. And no way did I want to do original research with that material. Some of the pure math I studied I liked and still like a lot, and some of it is a crucial pillar of the crucial applied math core of my startup.