Maths Rant

Rants about my love/hate relationship with Mathematics

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Oxbridge

On Gaining Perspective

September 13, 2025September 28, 2025 / Shub Das / Leave a comment

Last year, I was rejected from Oxford. No interview, just a flat-out rejection for Maths. In hindsight, that became one of the biggest turning points in my life and gave me something much more valuable than I expected: perspective. You don't always get what you want. Sometimes, you don't even get what you might deserve. … Continue reading On Gaining Perspective

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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! A lot of maths notes feel like they start on page two. You see a theorem, then a proof, then an example. As I slowly but surely work through catching up on lectures and revision, one of the questions I’ve found myself sitting with is this: I often find it hard to come up with ideas for things, and that probably shows in the spontaneous nature of both the topics and timing of my posts. 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.
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