The sky is no bigger than the mouth of the well.
I grew up in a house with no running water, 16 miles from the closest place that had a post office. I had a very parochial view of the world.
When I was growing up, I didn't know anything existed outside the borders of Buffalo.
True New Yorkers do not really seek information about the outside world. They feel that if anything is not in New York it is not likely to be interesting.
In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race, ... it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture. One's own products are likely to be personal or parochial.
I saw that we needed to grow but our top line wasn't growing, so we had to find other ways to grow the business. We had to reshape our business and acquire share in a non conventional way. But most tech leaders don't come out of a business background. They really have a parochial point of view. All they know are the go-go years of Silicon Valley. That's the environment in which they were raised.
Like works of literature, mathematical ideas help expand our circle of empathy, liberating us from the tyranny of a single, parochial point of view. Numbers, properly considered, make us better people.
What is there to see in Europe? I'll bet those foreigners can't show us a thing we haven't got right here in Georgia.
