Caela Ludovīca 🧭

i've become some kind of mathematical monk, i.e., i have a spartan life filled with exercise, maths, and latin. turkish get-ups, discrete differential geometry, veni vidi... aequivalentiam solvi?

Poor Higgs sitting over there all by itself… or maybe it’s a hermit Higgs

I drew this figure inside my copy of The Feynman Lectures. Past me leaves notes for future me like in that movie Memento…

I was thinking about it because these days I'm taking that approach with The Princeton Guide to Mathematics and the other one on applied math

That is an awesome tattoo! I just can't even

Instead of solving a gabillion problems, I went to the library and read extensively about whatever the prof talked about; I read lots of those things over and over. I graduated magna cum laude. Maybe my brain is just weird, but that's how it went for me.

The comprehensible input model for language learning applies to learning other things too and, just like used to be the case in Latin pedagogy, it's often assumed that learning just can't work like that, particularly in areas like math. But I did learn math and physics pretty much that way.

(3) Your goals don't have to match someone else's definition of mastery - the strength and understanding you have right now are real accomplishments, not just waypoints to someone else's destination.

(2) For the latter type of person, good learning feels like being led step-by-step by a friendly guide who assumes you belong and can understand, not like being tested for worthiness or prodded over hostile terrain.

Some things I've learned about learning that seem worth sharing. They seem so simple, but it took me a long time to apply these ideas to myself:

(1) Some people thrive on competition and threat of failure, while others (like me) are traumatized by it and need patient, scaffolded exposure instead.

to read mathematics as the language of all possible worlds, of the multiverse; every theorem as a wider lesson

use the schwarz

i feel the heaviness of the world so much; i want to find sanctuary in maths and physics and latinity, even though they’re products of an even crueler past

my chalkboard, in a room in my house that’s just for mathematical physics

holy wow i didn’t know it looked so awesome!