Author: Shub Das

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On the Forced Focus of Juggling Too Many Things

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My second year of university starts tomorrow and I'm not sure how to feel about that. In the past few months I’ve said yes to a lot of things. Looking at that list, I feel two things simultaneously: genuine excitement that any of it is happening at all, and on the other hand, a nagging uncertainty about whether I can actually hold it all without dropping something important and urgent. What nobody tells you is that there's a version of ‘busy’ which is energising, and also a side that's just anxiety wearing a productivity mask.

On Roguelikes and the Meditative State of Things

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Someone recently told me that reading one of my blog posts led them to play Celeste. So in that spirit, here's another post about pastimes. This time, it’s on Slay the Spire. For the uninitiated, Slay the Spire is a card based roguelike where you fight increasingly unhinged enemies and build a deck along the way. Every run is different and often also ends in death. In this way it has a lot in common with Celeste, except in Celeste the thing killing you is a mountain and in Slay the Spire it's sometimes your own ability (or lack thereof) of doing basic arithmetic.

A Week Well Drawn

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You know how you can get so absorbed in a book that it becomes your entire reality? The world outside the pages stops existing; you forget what you were worried about before you started reading. And then the story ends and you're launched, often abruptly, back into whatever life had paused from. That's exactly how last week felt for me. As a child I always wished to attend some kind of summer school but never got the chance to, so being able to volunteer at the UKMT Maths Summer School meant lot to me.

31 Posts and a Violin I Haven’t Learned to Play

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Last year during my June half-term break I was “supposed” to be revising for my A-Level Maths exams. Part of that revision, inevitably, involved rewatching Sherlock on iPlayer for what was probably the third time. Somewhere between those episodes I decided two things: I was going to start a maths blog, and I was going to learn the violin. One of those happened. So here’s a post on my one-year anniversary of my blog!

On ‘Feeling the Feeling’

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I know this is a ‘Maths’ blog, but if there's anything reading about the history of mathematicians has taught me, it's that they engaged in a lot of philosophical thought. So me ranting about things that aren't strictly maths is, I'd say, quite justified (not that I had to justify this anyway).

On (not) being able to do all the things

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I recently had a conversation with someone who told me they love the fact that there are questions we don’t know the answer to. Every time I encounter a new corner of mathematics I get this feeling of excited dread. "Oh no, this is fascinating" immediately followed by "I will never have enough time for all of this." So here’s a post about facing finitude, and borrowing phrases from people wiser than me.

The Exam Fear Strikes Back 

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Ideally I’d be spending today watching Star Wars (which I still will), but exams are around the corner, and apparently so is another attempt at dealing with them. These aren’t nearly as high-stakes as A-Levels were for me last year, but they still exist, and so does the comparison, doubt, and all the rest of it. Yoda said that fear is the path to the dark side or something. He wasn’t wrong, but he also didn’t have to sit a Linear Algebra paper.

Ryan Gosling, Revision, and Reasons to Care

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Spoiler warning: This post contains spoilers for Project Hail Mary. If you haven’t watched it yet, go watch it! Watching a Ryan Gosling movie and ending up with the sudden urge to revise central forces and orbital mechanics wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. And yet, here we are. Exam season is creeping closer every passing day, so I guess I can’t complain too much, but I will anyway, because that’s what this blog is for.

On Writing Like a Human (Whatever That Means Now)

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I started journalling when I was twelve. Blame the Stoics, or blame whatever it is that makes some kids turn inward instead of outward. I’ve been reading back over things I’ve written lately and I can’t always tell anymore whether it sounds like me. Or whether ‘sounds like me’ even means anything when so much of what I’ve absorbed, what we’ve all absorbed, has been shaped in some way, shape or form by the same LLMs we’re now comparing ourselves against. And with that, here’s a post on the difference between using a tool to say something and having a tool say it for you, and how I think we’re getting worse at knowing which one we’re doing.

The Missing First Page of Most Maths Notes

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A lot of maths notes feel like they start on page two. You see a theorem, then a proof, then an example. But mathematics didn’t descend from the heavens in perfect notation. It was made slowly, and often painfully, by people who couldn’t leave a problem alone. So here’s a post on why I think every maths topic should begin with four things: the problem it was invented to solve, the person behind it, the core intuition, and only then, the formal theorem.

The Things I Cannot Control 

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People often say “focus on what you can control” as if it’s that’s simple and isolating variables in life is as easy as it is on a problem sheet. There are so many things behind the phrase "let it go." History, attachment, hope, ego, fear, unprocessed conversations, futures that only existed in your head. Life isn’t a well posed problem. It’s chaos, entropy, with boundary conditions you didn’t choose. You can’t always cleanly separate the controllable from the uncontrollable when the thing you want sits right at that boundary. It is true that you can control the effort. But the gap between effort and outcome… that’s where frustration lives. And I wish I had something more reassuring to say about that.

On Proving Things (in Maths, and in Life)

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As much as this blog is about Maths, it's also about rants. So here's another one. This one doesn't come with an answer, just a question, and one I keep circling back to in lectures, problem sheets, and increasingly, in life. What does it actually mean to prove something? I'm sure this is a moment every budding mathematician hits eventually. You're sat there in a lecture, staring at a proof that's being written down far too confidently, wondering where the hell it came from. Not about how it works1, but why anyone thought to try that in the first place. I think that's the weird thing about proofs, once you see them, they often look inevitable, obvious, even. And yet, before you see them, they feel like they've appeared out of thin air.