And yet they do this all the frigging time in medical stories, as documented extensively on, for instance, Bad Science.
If you're calling the potential bride in your scenario Kate, you should really have called her suitor Petruchio :-)
I have a half-face mask along those lines made for me by an ex-girlfriend. Sadly, she was not a mathematician, so the specific formulae aren't of much interest. Nice to have for the occasional costumed ball, though.
I met a bloke once who had Euclid's proof of Pythagoras' theorem tattooed on his arm, and got into a drunken argument with him about whether or not he should have chosen a more elegant proof.
Cultivate a habit of confronting challenges - not the ones that can kill you outright, perhaps, but perhaps ones that can potentially humiliate you.
You may be interested to learn that high-end mountaineers apply exactly the strategy you describe to challenges that might kill them outright. Mick Fowler even states it explicitly in his autobiography - "success every time implies that one's objectives are not challenging enough".
A large part of mountaineering appears to be about identifying the precise point where your situation will become unrec...
I think that, while there's some truth in what you say, you're twisting yourself into intellectual knots to avoid having to reify (and thus admit to) arrogance. As far as atheism goes, I think you were much more on the money with your post about untheism and antitheism: in a secular society, untheism is rarely an issue, but antitheism (like all proselytising belief-systems) is very annoying to the recipients.
I remember explaining the Axiom of Choice in this way to a fellow undergraduate on my integration theory course in late 2000. But of course it never occurred to me to write it down, so you only have my word for this :-)