The whiteboard always reflects Simon’s current state of mind:
On the left are Simon’s notes after reading Physics Girl’s blog about quarks (the colourful stuff is foam clay):
Simon showed this expression with Phi to his math teacher, who noticed that Simon didn’t apply the quadratic formula (with a discriminant b2−4ac) in his solution. The teacher wondered if Simon knows the formula. As it turned out, Simon knew the formula very well but preferred to prove the solution on his own, because it was so beautiful in the case of Phi:
Geeks out of the box 