So a few months ago, I got a couple of tattoos. On my right shoulder I got a prism, and on my left shoulder I got the square root of negative one.

The prism is a symbol of beauty imparted through knowledge. The prism takes white light and splits it into a spectrum of component colors. The white light represents raw information, the prism is the mind, the spectrum is the raw information with the meaning imposed by knowledge.

The prism is also associated with Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest scientist of all time. He was the co-discoverer of Calculus, and the father of Classical or "Newtonian" Physics. Newtonian Physics and Calculus were major keys that lead to the Industrial Revolution and the Modern World as we know it.

The square root of negative one represents the opposite of the prism. Where the prism is a symbol of the power and beauty of the known, the square root of negative one represents the power and the importance of the unknowable.

The square root of negative one has been an important symbol to me since I read a book called "We" by Zevgeny Zamiatin when I was a teen. "We" was a predecessor to George Orwell's dysotopic novel "1984". "We" told the story of "D-503", a mathematician and engineer living in a society where everything a person did, down to the number of times a person brushed their teeth, was controlled by a master plan and a central authority. D-503 began the novel a perfect subject of the central authority. For him, the power and organization of central authority was synonymous with the power of the rules of mathematics. Both were absolute. When he first encountered the square root of negative one though, D-503 became frustrated. Frustrated because there was something that mathematics couldn't answer: a limit to knowledge, a limit to what the rules could do. In the totalitarian world that D-503 lived in, it meant that there were things that the central authority would never be able to control or understand. By the end of the novel, D-503 had come to embrace the square root of negative one. He learned that the unknown and the unknowable are as important to existence as the known and the knowable.

"We" was written by Yevgeny Zamiatin at the time of the Communist Revolution in Russia. It was the first book banned in the Soviet Union, and it remained banned until 1988. The square root of negative one means that there will always be things beyond the rules. It means there are the things that will always elude control and remain wild, and there are no final revolutions.

So I have geektoos. A prism for knowledge and its beauty on my right, and the square root of negative one for the unknowable and its beauty on my left.

Like many people who get tattoos, I got mine to impress a member of the opposite sex. It worked - for a time.