Abstraction's End
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About Me

Graduate student in mathematics; in that regard I primarily focus on category theory and mathematical physics. This is mostly a diversion from my real interest, which is, roughly speaking, a study of "intelligent organization", as includes not just human and machine intelligence, but things like language, social structure, principles of evolution, and so on.

I cannot look at anything without attempting to abstract it - to ask what general principles it is based on, implements, or derives from - thus did I go from physics to mathematics to abstract algebra to category theory, only to bottom out and realize that further "abstractions" were _adding_ conceptual overhead rather than _removing_ it; thus did I end up completely on my own, left alone (_made free_) to discover what came next for myself. This site will contain my answer. I believe it is the _final_ answer - the end of abstraction.

!hoverdrag~hoverdrag test~$\displaystyle \nabla \times {\mathbf E} = -\frac{\partial {\mathbf B}}{\partial t}$~ !hoverdrag~click me 2~!c{$\mathbf E$}{electric field}, !c{$\mathbf B$}{magnetic field} $:$ !c{$\mathbb R^3$}{spatial point $\vec p$} $\times$ !c{$\mathbb R$}{time $ t$} $\to$ !c{$\mathbb R^3$}{field vector at point $ \vec p$, time $ t$}~

About This Site

I built this site from scratch, writing everything from the nginx configuration file to (almost) every single line of HTML/(S)CSS/JS. It's the first website I've actually built, and I plan to start over soon now that I know the basic principles well enough to fully plan the design ahead of time.

My plan for the rewrite originally included some basic preprocessing so I didn't have to copy the common html head to every single file (though I figured out how to do that with server-side inclusions); naturally, this aggressively expanded into a plan for creating and implementing a sort of "transcendental preprocessing schema" When programming, I'll often feel like there's a single thing I'm trying to do, a single programmatic scheme, and what I'm actually writing is just a bunch of poor, specific ways of implementing this in different situations. I want to be able to explicitly write this one scheme. . It might take a while...