Awe

Writing and maths are the two cornerstones of advanced civilisation and when the two are combined, one can experience true awe. Recently I've been reading books on maths (sometimes my brain craves mental exercises, problem solving and understanding how people think) such as "The Archimedes Codex", "The man who loved only numbers" and "Born on a blue day". Sometimes you just have to sit back and be amazed at genius. After reading Archimedes' proof regarding the area of a parabola, I couldn't help but put down the book and be astounded at how he did it. Pure geometric genius. No calculus required, however he was ever so close to coming up with the idea. If only he had algebra and the Greeks didn't have a fear of infinity.
Talking about infinity, I like to freak out my year 11 maths students by telling (and proving to) them that there are the same number of even numbers (2, 4, 6, 8, ...) as there are whole numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ....). That's courtesy of Cantor.