Alan sighed woundedly, and gave Rudy a Significant Look which Waterhouse assumed meant that there would be trouble later. "If I may just make some headway, here," he said, "all I’m really trying to get you to agree on, is that mathematics can be expressed as a series of symbols," (he snatched the Lawrence-poking stick and began drawing things like + = 3) [square root -1] [pi] in the dirt) "and frankly I could not care less whether they happen to be Leibniz’s symbols, or Russell’s, or the hexagrams of the I Ching...."