Advith's Home Page

Hello! Welcome to my website.

I'm a grad student in mathematics but I have lots of interests, from botany to philosophy to music theory. Sometimes I write about them. So grab a cup of coffee or tea and relax:

Check out my blog for some fun discussion and writings.

Feel free to contact me if you ever want to talk!

Other interesting sites
https://ivsin.neocities.org/
https://hyperref.net/
https://wiby.me/

22-May-2025

Music of the Week: All Set by Milton Babbitt

Currently Reading: The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Thoughts:

• It's interesting that the academic writing style has coalesced with short, punctuated sentence - with very dashes or parenthaticals. It's a useful writing style for skimming, but not so useful for actually reading.
• Contemporary academics seem very anemic to claims of social rationality. This often leads to bizarre metaphysical and ontological claims like one often sees in specutalive realism or various forms of poststructuralism. It quite possible to do good social science without thinking about social rationality, but we see time and time again that scholars want to revive history of ideas - and that thinking in broader terms!
• The term "dopamine addict" is quite funny to me. Obviously stretching the word addiction like this can be quite harmful - but what's funny here is that we have a number of drugs (like bupropion) that increase the amount of dopamine in your system - and they're nonaddictive!

02-April-2025

Music of the Week: The Expanding Universe by Laurie Spiegel

Currently Reading: Higher Speculations: Grand Theories and Failed Revolutions in Physics and Cosmology by Helge Kragh

Thoughts:

• Applying to jobs both produces anxiety and excitement - fear and exhiliration about the future.
• Most mathematical arguments live beyond their strict formalization. Even when one can make arguments rigorous from sheaf theory or mathematical logic, it's important to realize that the idea of the argument is not the same as the formalization of the argument.
• The times may be quite dark ahead, but do remember that the owl of minerva takes flight at dusk.

22-Dec-2024

Music of the Week: Webern Op. 31 Mvt. 6

Currently Reading: Ancient Persia: A Concise History of the Achaemenid Empire, 550–330 BCE by Matt Waters

Thoughts:

• It's quite funny how all italian last names tend to mean things like "fat" or "stupid" or "zit-faced" downstream of Roman nicknames. It's one of the more charming systems of naming.
• Any field that constantly produces "revolutionary insights" or "turns" every 5 years is probably not a progressive research program, in the sense of lakatos. Revolutionary insights in a progressive field of research happen, at the very most, once every 30 years.
• In a similar vain, the minimum cycle for social revolutions is probably on the order of 5,000 years, if not longer. We only have two, maybe three examples: the industrial revolution, the neolithic revolution, and arguably behavioral modernity. If someone is speaking of a new social revolution, chances are they're just downstream of the industrial. Just as the neolithic revolution has lots of sputters and is a long process that culimnates in what we think of the ancient world - we should also think of the industrial revolution as a long process whose social changes are far from complete.

24-Nov-2024

Music of the Week: Analogiques A and B by Iannis Xenakis

Currently Reading: The Age of Empire by Eric Hobsbawm

Thoughts:

• A good knowledge of differential geometry and dynamical systems can take you far in life.
• In the manner by which they reshape our political landscpae, every recent technology seems to pale in comparison to the projects of mass literacy that start in the 19th century. No matter how advanced our computers are, the political change brought upon by access to reading seems to tower over them all.
• Multi-level marketing schemes keep on advertising themselves on campus, pastering flyers over classrooms and writing their messages on the chalkboards. They need to be made illegal, or at least we need university regulation stopping these predatory scams from making a mess of our campus and harming students.

14-Nov-2024

Music of the Week: Lepton by Charles Wuorinen

Currently Reading: Quantum Field Theory: A Tourist Guide for Mathematicians by Gerald B. Folland

Thoughts:

• Nationality is such a powerful force in our politics, I have no idea how historians of the future will grapple with its complexity, power and ubiquity.
• Doing good mathematics is mostly a function of how much you know and how much time you dedicate to writing.