I took a class taught by David Huffman (of Huffman coding) called Cybernetics (IIUC it was the UCSC equivalent of a class Wiener taught at MIT.
The very first day, he started out by talking about kissing spheres and concluded the lecture with "and that's why kissing spheres are easy in 7 dimensions" (or something like that).
Every lecture of his was like being placed in front of a window looking upon a wonderful new world, incomprehensible at first, but slowly becoming more and more clear as he explained. Sometimes I wish I could play in the garden of math.