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Zen Buddhism used to weird me out. I longed for the perceived minimalism and contemplation, but Zen also felt barren and inhuman, both passive and far too demanding. Still, I kept encountering it. When searching for a motivator beyond self-flagellation, Zen cropped up. When talking with my philosophically and spiritually...
Credit - Minna Sundberg Methodology unearths and explores regularities, structural properties of the world that enable our methods to (sometimes) snatch victory from the jaws of ever present computational intractability. The key intuition is that if different fields share the same regularity, then we can apply the methods from one...
When you think about it, most of what we know comes at a remove — many removes often. Most of what we know in science comes not from going through the experiments ourselves and pondering the results, but from the successive compressions, reevaluations, analyses and reductions of scientists and textbooks....
Lately I’ve been reading more intellectual histories. For those unaware of the genre, it’s a type of (usually scholarly) book that hunts down the origin of the concept we use, and how they were thought about and framed across time. Reading a few of these, a curious pattern emerged: there...
> I shall ask, then, why is it really worth while to make a serious study of mathematics? What is the proper justification of a mathematician’s life? And my answers will be, for the most part, such as are expected from a mathematician: I think that it is worth while,...
A few weeks ago, I read “The Egg of a Sea-bird” on Casey Dué’s substack, and got really interested in the work of Milman Parry and his assistant and successor Albert Lord. We’ll dig into the details, but broadly, Parry realized that the Homeric epics (both The Illiad and The...
As I ease out into a short sabbatical, I find myself turning back to dig the seeds of my repeated cycle of exhaustion and burnout in the last few years. Many factors were at play, some more personal that I’m comfortable discussing here. But I have unearthed at least one...