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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
One of the things I didn’t expect to miss at university was doing school maths challenges. There is something very strange about sitting in front of a problem that does not immediately make sense. No obvious method, or a nice worked example hiding in the back of the book. Just your brain, a question that … Continue reading On the Joy of Problem Solving
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
Maths Rant 