Leo's hand traced the faint wisps of thought through the air. His hand, slicing an elegant curve, was steady and smooth.
The change, he thought, the rise and fall of it. His mind's eye saw the colourful bursts of derivation, plotting the hand's trajectory. Sinusoidal? How dull, how pedestrian, to trace so simple a thought. His smile faded, his hand dropped into the negative of his mental Cartesian. Still, it remained flat and incisive.
Leo lunged forward, suddenly flitting out into the third dimension of space. A new depth added, he plunged foreward, trampling over his notes, covering them with chlorophyll and dirt. Spirals of air and gentle sheets of wind were sketched out effortlessly. The rate, the curve, the divergeance; mere considerations that followed his motion. The numbers came without strain or stress, using only the slightest of willed ability.
How natural it all came to be, how perfectly apt. He collapsed to the ground, giddy. Turning to the cool grass beneath him, one couldn't help but stare. The long strands truncated the muddy chaos of the earth. Each solitary strand a warped perpendicular of growth. Leo narrowed his eyes, attempting to pierce the veil of mere sight. The image came to him easily, of a colonnade of self-iterated building blocks. Fractals of verdure coiled implacably...
A fiddlehead, picked from the fern at arm's length, was brought to bear by Leo's probing fingers. It begged to him to be uncoiled, to be free from a simple ratio. The fingers brought entropy's wrath, and the uneven frond lay bare. He examined it for a moment, before tossing it onto his crumpled notes, where the pages lay open to lines of integrands.
The only proof, he thought, is all around me.