These notes are a growing collection. Some of the notes are thoroughly developed pieces of writing (e.g. Alan Lakein’s Life Goals Exercise). Others are just stubs (e.g. juggling). Despite their length and level of polish, they’re all things that I thought were worth noting.
The best way to navigate them is to use the Notes menu, and search. Alternatively, you might find the Tags helpful to find notes around a similar topic. There are tags which group posts according to how polished or sketchy they are.
These notes were inspired by:
A list of recurring topics of interest.
Some pictures of samples of three loop braids.
All graduate students eventually hit a point where facing the academic job market becomes inevitable. In my experience, it was intimidating to finally come to the end of my studies and start to reach out to the broader academic community.
This note collects various references related to blogging. Why people blog, how to blog, etc.
A visual comparison of various low-tech ways of photographing a braid.
Recordings are great, until they are not.
These are some notes about and care tips for the plants that I have in my office.
A list of common $\LaTeX$ errors that beginners make and their solutions. Helpful reading for people writing their first documents in $\LaTeX$.
Personal best practices for writing documents in $ aTeX{}$. Helpful reading for people writing their first documents in $ aTeX{}$.
Language independent literate programming with noweb.
A bit about my writing ritual.
A collection of resources about exercise. Why it is important, how to do it with minimal equipment, etc.
Advice that I offer to all students everywhere.
Against vim mastery.
How to add line spacing and line numbering to a $\LaTeX$ document.
Thoughts on how to prepare a probationary review dossier as a teaching stream faculty at UTSC.
This is a list of texts that I often recommend to people together with comments about those books. It is especially heavy on mathematics books, speculative fiction, and writing advice. Links to the Toronto Public Library and UToronto Library are provided.
What I pack when I travel.
This is a quick tutorial on how to use Simple Mass Downloader by George Prec for Firefox to download all the pictures of your kid from Lillio.
Thoughts about how to undo the effect of docstrip.
At the University of Toronto, we receive annual merit-based pay raises through a process called “Progress Through the Ranks”. This note is to intended to describe a setup for keeping track of information and documents relevant to PTR.
How I use newsboat and sfeed to generate a static page of RSS feeds that I follow.
How to get your course evaluation data and format it in $\LaTeX$.
If you’re a student doing things, please make a website.
Things I wish that I’d known when I started teaching.
What does the $\sin(x)$ button on a calculator really do?
A write-up of a question about loop manipulation and braid groups.
This talk introduces infinite limits by playing with a mysterious function in Python. It was originally given at Lester B. Pearson Collegiate in Scarborough on 2024-02-12.
Thoughts on how to design assessments which are valuable to students beyond completion, and which can be re-used over multiple years.
Links to juggling resources.
Introduction In this write-up, I’m going to talk about the Kruskal-Dynkin count, a card trick based on mathematics. I’ll give a heurisitic argument for why the trick works, and then present some experimental data about how the trick changes as the values of the cards change.
A list of things to prepare for a generic course.
I have wanted to build a sundial for a long time. Recently, I got inspired by Reinhold Kriegler’s brilliant reflected sundial.
How I’ve set up my ttys on Linux to be more user friendly. Switching fonts, keys, and backlights.
How I use a twenty year old word processor to write code and upload it to the cloud.
This is a checklist of things that I need to do on a weekly basis for work. It was inspired by Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.
I’m a fan of an old book on time management: How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life (1973) by Alan Lakein.
Last year, I did all of my course document preparation using docstrip, a standard component of LaTeX. It was revolutionary; docstrip allowed me to prepare all of my course documents in one large LaTeX project while maintaining a consistency of style across many formats including slides, quizzes, tests, and even posts to our learning management system.
From Ed Burger: Suppose that $N$ cards are placed on a table with $F$ of them face up. You know the values of $N$ and $F$, but you are unable to see the cards.
MathPrograms.org has tonnes of undergraduate research experience opportunities, but primarily focussed on the US. If you’re interested in mathematics, and based in Toronto or Canada, then there are a number of opportunities worth investigating.
Thanks for reading! If you have any comments or questions about the content, please let me know. Anyone can contact me by email.