The body odour of mathematics

This came up in as email conversation with doseybat today, and I thought it was too good to allow to go the way of all things ephemeral; buried in the depths of my mail archive:

i am here on my own happily describing my flower and its nice.

Sounds lovely. I suppose what I'm doing is quite similar. I have an abstract
idea in my head - my flower to be described, if you like. It's unique, at
least mostly so, yet somehow I have to figure out how to describe it in print
to someone who has never even seen a flowering plant before.

It can be done.

I need to find the right pictures, but paint them with words, equations and
diagrams. Mathematics can sometimes be beautiful, if you squint at it in just
the right way and don't get too concerned by it's body odour...

ooh body odour of mathematics. make a detailed description of it if you
can!

It is a complex scent. Some of the vapours are millennia old, dry and dusty.
Others dead, buried and rotting. Yet there are still overtones of sunlight,
the pure essence of discovery. Imagine, for the first time in centuries,
cracking open a lost tomb full of hidden riches. Take a deep breath, and you
have the answer.