The Evening Light, and a Bent Spoon It was late again last night. A client call had dragged, as they sometimes do, into the quiet hours after my wife had already gone to bed. I found myself in the kitchen, making a cup of chai, and my gaze fell on a spoon I’d accidentally bent earlier in the day. A small thing, really. But as I looked at its distorted curve, an idea surfaced, something I’d been pondering about the nature of shapes, and how we understand them. We often think of mathematics as precise, rigid. And much of it is. But there’s a branch, a beautifully liberating one, that sees the world with a different eye. It’s called topology . Imagine you have a rubber sheet. You can stretch it, twist it, even crumple it, but you can’t tear it or glue parts together. In topology, a coffee cup with a handle is, in a profound sense, the same as a donut. Both have one hole. A sphere? That’s just a squashed cube. No holes. No matter how much you deform them, as long as you don’t rip them, t...