I'm a big advocate for not hiding your enthusiasm for things. It seems to me that there is a false stigma around eagerness in our culture of unbothered ambivalence. This outlook perpetuates the idea that it's not cool to want it. That people who don't try are fundamentally more chic than people who do.

Never be ashamed of trying, effortlessness is a myth.

Taylor Swift
intelligence math physics history biology sports personal

Implementing Automatic Differentiation in Pure Python

Forward-mode and reverse-mode autodiff in python featuring dual numbers and graph traversals

Hinweise zur deutschen Sprache [WIP]

Eine Anmerkung jedes Mal, wenn mich die deutsche Sprache verwirrte

Sums of random variables and convolutions

A note on how Gaussians are convolved to make the reparameterization trick work in the diffusion forward process.

Using shuf to select random ports in a cluster

A few tricks in bash to generate random numbers

JavaScript to change video playback speed

because sometimes, you want to go faster than 2x

Max Verstappen breaks Suzuka Lap Record!

and for nostalgia's sake, a couple of perfect qualifying laps from Seb Vettel

Classical Chess Stream 4

the horse jumps everywhere

2025 Abel Prize

Masaki Kashiwara for contributions to algebraic analysis and representation theory

Blog Checklist

Using this post to check if I have coded up everything I want in this blog.

Vernal Equinox 2025 links

the best of the internet over the last season

Tolstoy on History

he really dislikes the great man theory of history, but more than that, he dislikes Napoleon.

2024 Turing Award

Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton for pioneering Reinforcement Learning

Winter Solstice 2024 links

the best of the internet over the last season

Aprendiendo Español [WIP]

Notas que he tomado mientras aprendía español.

Troy, (2004) dir. Wolfgang Peterson

some of the best lines from my all-time favourite movie

Distilling Stockfish into a Transformer

My thoughts on the "Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search" paper from Google DeepMind

New + Mersenne + Largest Prime Found

After six long years, and for the first time using GPUs

India win everything at the Chess Olympiads!

Hopefully the beginning of something meaningful in Indian sport that is not cricket

Autumn Equinox 2024 links

the best of the internet over the last season

An Elliptic Curve with Rank $\ge$ 29 has been found

more math news from Mathstodon

On the sums of multiples of two numbers

A pattern that has evaded explanation for a long time, so I'm posting it here.

$x^n/n!$ and Stirling's Formula

What is the size of the shift between two successive curves and how do you show that they intersect at integer points?

Thoughts on Novak Djokovic

After his Olympic Gold run

Olympic Medals per Capita

A much superior metric than the raw medal tally.

Colonization of Venus

Building floating castles, literally and figuratively.

Like a river of steel it flowed, grey and ghostlike

An account of the WW1 German Army marching through Brussels by Richard Harding Davis.

Summer Solstice 2024 links

the best of the internet over the last season

A very nice ruler and compass geometry puzzle

Find the shortest route between two points in a circle by touching the circumference along the route.

Vielen Dank für alles, Herr deutscher Scharfschütze

Toni Kroos retires from professional football

Sebastian Vettel Drives Senna's McLaren MP4/8 in Imola

Easily the best brand ambassador for the sport

International Women in Mathematics Day

Remembering 2014 Fields Medallist Maryam Mirzakhani

The Games of Robert James Fischer

A LiChess study while I go through a couple books with his most famous games.

Recreational Math Dump

Some fun questions I've been trying to solve on and off this month

Liquefying Silica

An appendix to my previous blog post on Isostasy

Isostasy and Mountain Heights

What is the tallest structure that can remain standing on an almost spherical mass?

The Tortured Poets Department

Taylor Swift's eleventh studio album is out!

2023 Turing Award

Avi Wigderson for foundational contributions to the theory of computation.

Temperature

and some more thermodynamics

Infinitesimal Worms

A discontinuity paradox

2024 Abel Prize

Michel Talagrand for contributions to probability theory and functional analysis

Vernal Equinox 2024 links

the best of the internet over the last season

The Ides of March are upon us

celebrate by declining all meetings

Richard Hamming on Claude Shannon

An anecdote that stuck out to me from Hamming's You and Your Research

Dimensional Analysis on Loss Functions

A half-baked idea I had while checking my equations

Silman's Complete Endgame Course

A book review

Navier Stokes and smoothness

My notes while trying to make sense of the Navier Stokes problem

Engine Efficiencies

and my attempts to relearn thermodynamics

Automatic Content Selection

Notes from Stephen Wolfram's blog

Dynamic Programming [UFO]

Some notes on rod-cutting, LCS, and 0-1 Knapsack...

Scaling Carbon Capture

One of the most important problems to work on at this point in history.

MSTD sets

explicit constructions of sets with more unique pairwise sums than differences

How do we lose body mass?

How does the weight we lose exactly leave our body?

Winter Solstice 2023 links

the best of the internet over the last season

Reorganizing Site Content

GitHub issue tracking much needed changes

F. Scott Fitzgerald about the first world war

from Tender is the Night

Segmentation model outputs as prompts to SAM

Some ideas on improving semantic segmentation with SAM

Division Algorithm Theorem

a very elegant proof that I learnt after many hours of toil

1989 (Taylor's Version)

The re-recording of Taylor Swift's fifth studio album is out!

How do you know what you care about?

Correspondence with a friend

Book 22, The Odyssey

At the time of the grand reveal

Katalin Kariko and UPenn

UPenn apparently fired a future Nobel Prize winner and are attempting to recoup their losses

Max-bounds on information travel speeds

A dumb attempt by me to go faster than the speed of light

Autumn Equinox 2023 links

the best of the internet over the last season

OEIS A004207

Analysis of Entry A004207 in the OEIS

On LinkedIn

A rant

A Variation of the Four Fours Problem

Streaming while doing math

On short form video content

A rant

Seam Carving — Energy Function

Live Coding Seam Carving Part 2

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

A review of the Richard Rhodes book

Für Therese

Some cool facts about Beethoven's masterpiece from John Carlos Baez on Mathstodon

Intermediate Activations in Llama 2.7B

there is a country layer in the llama 2 transformer

Why is Sapiens so polarizing?

Partly a book review, partly a rant

the inexorable march of time...

where does this phrase come from?

Notes on Nausea

from Complications by Atul Gawande

John Bardeen

Imagine winning two Nobels for Physics

Symmetry and Newton's Laws

A very nice method to have in your problem-solving toolkit

Muse, tell me of the man of many wiles

The opening lines from Allen Mandelbaum's translation of The Odyssey

Conway's Game of Life is omniperiodic!

A very good thread (with an unexpected Alexander crossover) from Mathstodon

IMO 1988 Day 2, Question 6

an elegant problem with an even more elegant solution

Einstein Summation Notation Exercises

Exercises in faster and more intuitive tensor notation for deep learning.

John Conway's Doomsday Algorithm

This is a very good party trick to learn

Speak Now (Taylor's Version)

The re-recording of Taylor Swift's third studio album is out!

Faster Factorial Approximations

Comparing factorial computation times vs. approximation as exponentiation, gamma functions, and Stirling's approximation.

Summer Solstice 2023 links

the best of the internet over the last season

Rafael Nadal's dominance at Roland Garros

some perspective by Nicholas Mahut

Informed Consent

What does this even mean?

Convergence of an Arithmetic Mean Series

Prove that a series where each term is the arithmetic mean of the previous two terms converges.

Verstappen Rising

realistically, what is stopping him before 2026?

Get Some Free Speech While You Can

Freedom of expression isn't the tool of the powerful; it's the tool of the powerless

Field Trip to Citi Neuro Hospital

a travel journal of sorts

Vernal Equinox 2023 links

the best of the internet over the last season

$\LaTeX$ pipeline

How I work with $\LaTeX$ locally instead of using OverLeaf

Amnesia

some thoughts and questions

The Human Placenta

some cool stuff I learnt from a podcast

Visualizing and Working with Audio Files

Helper code that has different ways to visualize audio files, mostly for future reference.

Lionel Messi is a World Champion!

every head must bow, every tongue must confess

Root Finding with Newton's Method

Testing whether Newton's method decays updates exponentially

Exercises in Number Theory [UFO]

Proofs and solutions from "Elementary Introduction to Number Theory" by Calvin Long

Some fun math puzzles

One of these is not like the other

Seam Carving — Intuition and Ideas

Live Coding Seam Carving Part 1

Midnights

Taylor Swift's tenth studio album is out!

IYMC 2022 Qualification

some solutions I wrote up

Multilingual Speakers

The neuroscience of speaking multiple languages, and switching between them.

Act III Scene II, Julius Caesar

The greatest speech ever written in my opinion, I'm learning to perform this

Sebastian Vettel's Greatest Hits

indulging in some nostalgia

The Genius of The Crowd

by Charles Bukowski

Chess Endgames

A collection of chess endgames that I found interesting/tricky.

Sebastian Vettel F1 retirement

I guess it was inevitable

Cristiano Ronaldo in The Player's Tribune

a collection of my favourite lines from the article

Maryam Mirzakhani anecdote

Is it right?

4th BongCloud Classical Chess Tournament

My first OTB chess tournament!!

2022 Fields Medals

number theory, sphere packing, and chromatic polynomials

Summer Solstice 2022 links

the best of the internet over the last season

Nicer ceil function in C++

The inbuilt ceil function was being very unwieldy. I prefer defining my own inline function now.

The Hellespont

something about crossing water bodies

Rafael Nadal wins the 2022 French Open!

Twenty Two Grand Slams and counting...

Real Madrid win La Decimocuarta!

somos los reyes de europa

Productivity Culture

why aren't we working lesser hours even with technological advancement?

Death [WIP]

Lecture Notes of the 2007 Series at Yale taught by Shelly Kagan along with some personal opinions.

Nietzsche's "Morality is Cowardice"

harmless =/= moral

Thoughts on Privacy

the burden of proof of a crime falls upon the state, or something along those lines

Rafael Nadal wins the 2022 Australian Open

Twenty One Grand Slams!

Some Kimi Räikkönen stats

Probably the most talented driver in the 21st century

If, by Rudyard Kipling

easily the greatest poem ever written, with emphasis on my favourite lines, which is like 80% of the poem.

The Placebo Effect

My attempt to understand this strangest of phenomena. Something I think can revolutionize modern medicine.

Modular Arithmetic

Storing a few results here for future use

How Many Recursive Calls Does a Recursive Function Make?

a wild fibonacci appears

So, you think you're bad at math...

A video from Prof. Courtney Gibbons I revisit a lot

Huberman Lab Podcast [UFO]

Collection of important ideas from the Huberman Lab Podcast. Not Medical Advice!!

Skill Moves — An Analysis

Understanding skill moves in football and making a case for the body feint.

Justice

Lecture Notes of the 2009 Series at Harvard taught by Micheal Sandel along with some personal opinions.

Traffic event description using Unsupervised Learning Methods

13th International (Online) Conference on Transportation Planning and Implementation Methodologies for Developing Countries

August 2020 Release Notes [UFO]

just some links

July 2020 Release Notes

Karim Benzema and Taylor Swift's Folklore

June 2020 Release Notes [UFO]

Fermat's Last Theorem, Essay Writing and the return of La Liga and Serie A.

Report — GSoC with TensorFlow

Official Work Product Submission for the 2020 edition of Google Summer of Code with TensorFlow.

May 2020 Release Notes

A revision of first principles and more mathematics

Virology [UFO]

Notes from Virology Lectures by Vincent Racaniello

Proof that $\exp(x)=\displaystyle\lim_{n\rightarrow\infty}\left(1+\frac{x}{n}\right)^{n}$

A math-heavy but super elegant proof that I learnt

April 2020 Release Notes

Mathematics mostly, with some code sprinkle-tossed in. Solving puzzles never felt more exhilarating.

Google Code Jam

Analysis and Solutions for the 2020 edition of Google's annual Code Jam competition.

March 2020 Release Notes

There was always going to be only one story...

February 2020 Release Notes

Audiobooks, running, and the coronavirus.

January 2020 Release Notes

Hardcore History, Kobe Bryant and new adventures.

Binary Search Trees

Notes for a lecture I gave as an undergrad