If you draw a perfect circle, congratulations. You’re the first human person ever to do so. They’ll invite you to The Institute to give a brief talk, and a small ocean of jealous mathematicians will have to listen to you say there was a lot of luck involved. I can’t even honestly say I was trying. One professor in particular will go home to his cat, depressed, in need of a new research programme. He will pivot to a subdiscipline that had been only a minor chapter in his dissertation: the algebra of clouds. One day, doodling at his desk, he will inadvertently produce the perfect image of a low-slung cumulus cloud. He will sit there and weep, openly, already thinking of his talk.