Maths Rant

Rants about my love/hate relationship with Mathematics

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Rekindling

July 9, 2025September 10, 2025 / Shub Das / Leave a comment

It’s been exactly 20 days since my last A-Level exam. And honestly? I thought I’d feel free. But instead, I’ve been left with this strange, heavy emptiness, a kind of grief almost. It feels as if I’ll never be able to enjoy learning again, or find anything that lights me up the way maths once … Continue reading Rekindling

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One of the things I didn’t expect to miss at university was doing school maths challenges. I think my first memory of cooking involves burning pasta. And at the time, I decided cooking simply wasn’t for me. 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. As much as this blog is about Maths, it’s also about rants. So here’s another one. One of the games I’ve been playing over the past few days is Celeste. If you’ve ever played it, you’ll know: you die. Constantly. Sometimes hundreds, thousands of times in a single chapter. Every January, without fail, I write the date down wrong at least once. That’s expected. But what’s less expected is that my brain occasionally still wants December to be the tenth month. Which, objectively, it isn’t, but linguistically? It kind of is. There’s a claim about snowflakes that’s repeated so often it starts to feel axiomatic: no two are alike. It’s one of those facts that sits quietly in the back of your mind. You don’t question it. You just accept it, file it away, and move on. It’s getting to that time of the semester again, the part where your brain is somewhere between tired and trying its best, and every test paper starts to look the same. And sometimes, when I’m staring at an exam I’m meant to be focusing on, my mind wanders into questions that have nothing to do with the module I’m sitting. Showing up to lectures early comes with perks beyond just getting good seats. Most mornings on my way in to one of the lecture halls, I walk past one particular poster (attached at the end of this post) which captures the beautiful shifting image of particle collision. Until recently, I’d never really thought about how or why that happened, or that process even had a name: lenticular printing. Inevitably, it had to become one of my posts, and true to form, here’s my attempt at explaining it without it (hopefully!) sounding like a boring Physics textbook.
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