Here is a taxonomy of the skyspace posts from the last year:
- psets & essays from classes
- explanations of cool ideas from some lectures
- some cool questions that I thought of while doing research
- meta “what is the meaning of research & life” posts
- some cute little problems from various books that I read
- some cool problems that I heard from friends
- more philosophy
I’m quite happy with the variety and quantity of posts. In total there were 90 posts in 2023 to-date and 10 posts in 2022. The posts were very not evenly spaced out, but this is still an average of 2 posts per week, which is a remarkable cadence. Is there anything I would change? I kind of wish I had a larger number of high quality posts. I think doing more appearences of the characters would be fun as well.
ok, now what you’ve actually been waiting for.
Top 5 posts of the year
- hashing: This post is my all-time favorite for sure. I love it because it really helps me make sense of what does research mean. It’s easy to say “I do math because I think its fun”. But I think its easy to get discouraged, especially if you try something for a couple months and it feels like no progress. The main idea of this post was that the point of research, to me at least, is to be immersed in a cool problem. To the point where, its probably what you talk about whenever you talk to anyone. To the point where you have a lot of cool non-trivial observations a lot of failed attempts. A lot of conjectures. I can’t do it justice here, go read the post.
- cool parallel algorithm and fun characters: This post is fun because its a cool algorithm and also because of the characters. I really liked writing them.
- simply periodic binary functions: I like this one because this is a simple problem that I thought about probably for a week or two (or maybe a month) and fully solved. I think the bijection is rather slick and I just like the number theory involved. The lemma didn’t end up being directly useful for my research but I’m glad I saw the problem through anyways.
- k-server on a circle: I like this one because I saw a cool problem mentioned in a paper and thought about it and solved it and it was interesting.
- train tracks: again, read a paper and actually desribed it: I learned a ton from reading this paper and summarizing it here.