Break

Now that this blog has been up for over a year and its been a while since the last article it’s a good time to look back. What caused the break in articles? what else is broken? What to break to improve things?

First let’s break with tradition. From now on I will write these articles mostly or entirely in the first person. Why didn’t I do this earlier? Well mostly because I was trying to write some of these articles in the style of mathematical texts.

I have come to the conclusion that several of these self-imposed rules run counter to what I was trying to achieve. I’m certainly aiming for a technical audience, but there was no real reason to make things harder on myself and you just to hold to a style many people may not even be familiar with. The deeper lesson is that I shouldn’t mind breaking a couple of my own rules as long as it doesn’t harm the ultimate end goal of writing good articles.

I also intend to break a couple of other people’s rules. The first I will take care of in the intermission, which is the rule that the personal lives of mathematicians should never be mentioned alongside their achievements. The second is the rule that all mathematical discoveries be presented as if they arise spontaneously, rather than being the result of lots of trial and error which is then reverse-engineered into a sequence of definitions that look inevitable. There’s at least one article in my head that I want to write without leaving out the trial and error.

And lastly I intend to give myself a break by avoiding deadlines. That change will be less visible, at best you may see me changing the estimated time of release on the hidden drafts page into percentages. I also intend to try not to care so much about past intentions (including this one).

These changes are intended not just to improve these articles but also remove the obstacles in the way of writing them. I’m happy with the articles that are on here, and possibly the large gaps were caused more by outside factors than anything to do with the way they were written, but when reality harshly reminds you that it only cares about its own rules then there is only one thing you can do.

Bend.