You look at the world.
You see a phenomenon that is terribly interesting
and you ask yourself:
"Why do they do what they do?" 
"Why are they such stable structures?"
Mathematical model-building
is the process of coming up with
some description mathematically relating various
observables or measurable quantities to each other
and hopefully discovering a very simple 
law - relationship - between them.
When we do these abstractions, we still want to capture some fundamental truth about the universe.
In the case of bubble rings, we see these thin tubes
moving, deforming, collapsing, splitting.
So... what's a nice abstraction?
Well, take a curve that describes
the center line of that tube,
together with its thickness, and see how
these variables develop over time. 
It's always a bit of meandering
through this jungle of - in our case -
differential geometry
that gets us to the right equations
that actually capture things.
So the finale equations may look
bewildering, with all kinds of coefficients
and things in there - terms in there -
but the abstract principle starts
very very simply with just this curve,
and its thickness, and then forces due to them.
For me, personally, that's a rush
when I can see that a very simple principle
gives rise to the complexity of appearance,
 as we perceive it.
Some bits will one day - hopefully -
make a really meaningful contribution
I mean, that's the wonderful thing about mathematics:
it often is very very abstract and you
wonder, "what the hell?" and then
somewhere down the line somebody
discovers something and realizes that a
certain piece of mathematics is a
perfect match for this.
