Epistemology. The study of the nature and origin of knowledge. When I was a teenager, I felt that adults mostly spoke in analogies. They made dogmatic statements that they could not uphold. "God will punish you if you use His name lightly," they claimed. "A sentence should never end with a preposition." At that time, my self-confidence mainly stemmed from my ability to argue, so I responded intellectually. I became obsessed with figuring out what is true, if it even exists, and in what sense. Around this time, two things happened. I became acquainted with plane geometry, which I found fascinating, and I realized that the expression "mathematically proven" is commonly synonymous with "absolutely certain.".