In the summer of 2017, I thought to myself, “I should make a website and blog about math.” I did not blog about math that summer. Frankly, I did not do very much math that summer either (sorry Ryan). I did, however, make the first version of this website, which at the time used Jekyll, and wrote some snippets of code to convert my TeX files into MathJax-parseable markdown. Over the years, I occasionally updated this website, but made few substantial changes. This continued until sometime in early 2021, when I tried to switch from my theme at the time, Minima, to a new theme. Powered by a volatile combination of impatience and incompetence, I not only failed to change themes, but somehow corrupted my Jekyll installation in such a way that I could not produce any website that was not the theme’s default page. Despite reinstalling Jekyll, starting a brand new website, and (attempting to) purge this new theme from my system, I could not rectify the situation.

After some struggles, I gave up. Because only the local version of my website was broken, my website remained online – I just couldn’t change it. This was unfortunate, because during this time, I started graduate school, and people actually started looking at my website! Also since starting graduate school, I’ve tried to regularly give talks at student seminars. I usually choose topics that I don’t know very much about. Because I am overambitious, I consistently underestimate how long it will take me to actually learn these topics. Because I usually don’t mind improvising, I have very little sense of urgency when it comes to preparing things (apologies to anyone who was at my “Isospectral Manifolds” talk). As a result, I almost never finish my notes before the talk happens. I also sometimes write down sketches of proofs of interesting results that I learn from Frank or from other students, and don’t always finish them.

This summer, one of my goals is to flesh out several of the notes that I’ve left unfinished. To that end, I bit the bullet, started a new website – using Hugo this time instead of Jekyll, patched up my LaTeX to Markdown script to work with KaTeX, and wrote my first post. (This is being written after the Vinogradov’s theorem post, oops).

Let’s see how long this lasts :)