Ah, yes, seeing notation in color is common. Also integers. (My spouse does this; you can say “what color is 536” and they’ll answer immediately. I think they just see it, they’re not working it out.)
I was thinking of abstract objects like a non-abelian group or something
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Oh, in that case: me. Though it's too strong. When I've been thinking hard about some type of objects, I start to get slight color (and other) associations with them. It's not chosen, and (I think) fairly repeated, i.e., the color doesn't change.
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Hard to describe because it's often _not_ especially visual (more spatial / kinesthetic, a kind of felt sense). And I rarely think much seriously about mathematics these days.
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Thanks! “Slightly colored but not really visual” is really interesting, and I think I know what you mean.
It’s probably been decades longer since I’ve thought seriously about mathematics than since you have! I’m running off of distant memories of experience here
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It's just an evoked sense. For instance, when working on this paper (arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0 ) I thought pretty hard for a while about some of the central objects. Enough that much of the core work was done on long walks.
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All hard core thinking is done on long walks [why?]
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hmm
i never tried taking long walks in grad school maybe that was the problem 🤔
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You were at BERKELEY and you didn’t go for long walks???
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mea culpa! i was very depressed 🙃
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I am sorry :(
Berkeley hills were designed and provided specifically by The Goddess for mathematical research
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i did quite enjoy doing the thing where you walk around campus but take a different route each time, when it occurred to me to do that