Maths Rant

Rants about my love/hate relationship with Mathematics

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The Case for Side Projects

August 7, 2025August 29, 2025 / Shub Das / Leave a comment

I used to think (and honestly, I still do sometimes) that I needed to “learn everything first” before starting a programming project. I’d spent hours reading textbooks or watching YouTube videos feeling like I was “being productive”. But I’ve never actually code. Part of me was scared of getting it wrong, of producing something “rubbish”. … Continue reading The Case for Side Projects

Recent Posts: Maths Rant

On Writing Like a Human (Whatever That Means Now)

The Missing First Page of Most Maths Notes

On the Value of Mathematics in the Age of GenAI 

One Step at a Time

On the Joy of Problem Solving

Measuring by Eye

The Things I Cannot Control 

On Proving Things (in Maths, and in Life)

‘I don’t know. It’s a mystery.’

New Year, Old Confusion

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. 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.
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