## Mathematics is an Art

**Abstraction**. Modern Mathematics is all about abstraction. Abstraction, at its heart, is **selective ignorance**. That is, faced with something, whether a problem to be solved, or something else, we want to know:
1. What we need to pay attention to; and importantly
2. **What we can ignore**.
By ignoring **everything that we can ignore**, we **simplify** the problem. The more we ignore, the simpler the problem becomes. When learning to draw, we are often taught about **negative space**. This is similar in some senses. By trying to draw *everything but what you intend to draw*, you can more easily focus on only the shape, whereas if you try to focus on drawing, say a person, if you focus on the person, then you are distracted by their face, by their clothes, by the expression on their face.