The holidays are a good time to reflect on one’s life, including one’s intellectual life. Here is a brief excerpt from my own self-reflections in my (as of yet unpublished) intellectual autobiography:

My intellectual life truly began during the summer of 1998, the year I left my law practice and began teaching. Like a modern-day Augustine, I emerged from the darkness of Plato’s cave and left behind my dull and dreary life of billable hours and corporate clients. But instead of converting to Christianity, Marxism, or some other dour dogma, I became a literary law professor and a devotee of mathematical models and science. But mind you, I didn’t start out this way. No one does. Before I entered the legal academy, the “Republic of Mathematics” and the sacred teachings of science were as foreign to me as the savannahs of East Africa or the steppes of Mongolia. This, then, is my story, the story of my madcap intellectual metamorphosis …

Read the rest of my “madcap intellectual metamorphosis” here.

P.S. — happy birthday Sydjia!