These are notes from a panel discussion with graduate students, admissions officers, and professors at Northwestern University from July 18th. They answered questions on what to do when applying for grad school, how to choose universities, etc., and I organized and trimmed their responses into these notes.
Epistemic injustice is a term introduced by Miranda Fricker in her book of the same name. At a core level, epistemic injustice means that someone is being wronged as a knower, that they have been discriminated against in their means of receiving or sharing knowledge. As lovers of learning, combating epistemic injustice should be a central project for all academics.
When a mathematician is asked why they enjoy math, they are as likely to comment about math’s intrinsic beauty or artistic elements as they are to mention its usefulness or ubiquity in science. However, it is more difficult to express to non-mathematicians why a particular idea or proof is beautiful than why it is useful, and so the gap between mathematicians and non-mathematicians on why math is alluring persists. Mathematical beauty means something different to each person: in this post, I express what it means to me.
Willow is my family and I’s cat, and she’s about two years old. As far as I’m concerned, she’s just as helpful as any of the notes, tutorials, or articles on here.
This video, The Tale of Three Triangles, is a long form video discussing the convergent behavior of the random Chaos Game, the deterministic Sierpinski’s triangle, and the combinatorial Pascal’s triangle. This video took me months, over 5000 lines of animation code, and a script longer than any of my philosophy essays. It was eventually recognized by 3Blue1Brown as an honorable mention for storytelling in the Summer of Math Exposition #1.