Reading this reminds me a little of mathematicians like Ramanujan who spent a fair amount of time just playing around with random numbers and finding connections, although in this case, I imagine the author knew the history from the beginning.
Anyway, I feel like my math degree sort of killed some of that fun exploration of number relations — but I did like that kind of weird doodling / making connections as a kid. By the time I was done with the degree, I wanted to think about connections between much more abstract primitives I’d learned, but it seems to me there are still a lot of successful mathematicians that work this way — noticing some weird connection and then filling out theory as to why, which occasionally at least turns out to be really interesting.