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Rants about my love/hate relationship with Mathematics

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Why Time Zones are Bad at Maths

August 18, 2026 / Shub Das / Leave a comment

Before last week, it had been over two years since I last took a flight to India. As standard, my phone and laptop synced automatically to the local time zone. My watch, which was also supposed to sync automatically, didn't. Usually, when a piece of tech acts up, you just feel a flash of annoyance, … Continue reading Why Time Zones are Bad at Maths

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Before last week, it had been over two years since I last took a flight to India. My phone and laptop synced automatically to the local time zone. My watch, which was also supposed to sync automatically, didn’t. Usually, when a piece of tech acts up, you just feel a flash of annoyance, fix it, and move on. But it got me thinking about what actually happens when we step across a border and change our clocks. As it turns out after a bit of going through various rabbit holes, the way we map time across the globe is a fascinating and chaotic compromise between geometry and history.  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 @ukmathstrust Summer School meant lot to me. I picked up crochet again a few weeks ago, after over a year of not touching it. For a while I was made to feel like it wasn’t a worthwhile use of my time, and eventually I just put it down. Picking it back up has reminded me how grounding it is. This isn’t actually my first hyperbolic surface. Last year I started on a project and called it ‘Hector: my hyperbolic emotional support demon’. Somewhere between moving houses and going back and forth to university, he’s gone missing until further notice— or, more poetically, has transcended into a higher dimensional space which our minds simply cannot access. So this project is ‘Hector II: The Return of the Ruffle’ Belated appreciation post as I continue to process the fact that everything we see only makes up about 5% of the universe. Anyway, I’d love to be back here anytime! Thanks @cern (and the awesome gift shop!) #AtCERN Today marks one year of mathsrant. 31 posts, 4,300+ views, 2,300+ visitors, and readers in over 50 countries; none of which I expected when I wrote the first post twenty days after my last A-Level exam, still processing what I can only describe as post-exam grief. Watching a group of Year 7s sit through a lecture on gravity and black holes earlier this week as part of an outreach event made me feel almost envious. They weren’t afraid to give an answer and get it wrong, or even afraid to ask a question that might sound silly. They just blurted things out, no judgement attached. I couldn’t help but wonder, when did we lose that? I have unlocked my phone with my face probably thousands of times. Never have I ever once thought about it. Then, a few weeks ago, I sat in a lecture about something called eigenfaces. And now I cannot stop thinking about my phone May the 4th be with you. Spoiler warning: This short post contains spoilers for Project Hail Mary. If you haven’t watched it yet, go watch it!
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