My Too (Many) Cents

The great mathematician GH Hardy once shared an anecdote of his meeting with S. Ramanujan: I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways." Indeed, each number is special if we analyse it for long enough. Ramanujan and his work are regarded by many as the pinnacle of mathematical intuition. He could see patterns unravel themselves, and had also obtained a fundamental intuition for the numbers. Many of us have been exposed to this mathematical beauty occasionally throughout our study of the subject -the so called “joy of mathematics”- even though we may not feel it. For example, a repeatedly used number like one, two or zero doesn’t merely represent a concept, a definition, an object or a transformation. It is something that transcend...

  A word that gets thrown around quite a bit these days in media jargon and any type of intellectual discourse is a social media "Echo Chamber". Many people believe that most forms of radicalization in the current world can be attributed to such echo chambers. An echo chamber is a system where a person starts receiving opinions that strengthen their own and invalidate others' opinions that conflict with theirs. In other words, it is a   self-fulfilling confirmation bias . There is a lot of debate about such echo chambers. In the first place, do they even exist? People do not like to be proved wrong and also like to feel that their thoughts (and hence, actions) are perfectly rational and unadulterated. They insist that their radical opinions are formed solely on the basis of facts and that those accusing them of being in an echo chamber are trying to curb certain feelings among them so that they cannot form a united front to campaign for their demands. They feel that the a...

  Introduction The word meta comes up in a variety of different fields from philosophy to linguistics to theatre and even gaming. It represents an interesting concept and is often used as an adjective where an author breaks the fourth wall(like this!), when something refers to itself (like this blog post) or when we try to ascend one level of abstraction and analyze the governing dynamics of some process rather than analyzing the process itself. The word root meta comes from greek which loosely means change', 'between' and 'beyond'. In video game Jargon, it also means 'Most Effective Tactic Available', which is again, the discussion of the tactics behind the game instead of analyzing the game itself. To understand those definitions clearly, here are some words that are derived from the same root. Metacognition:  Thoughts about our own thoughts Meta conversation: A conversation about a conversation Metacriticism: A criticism of another criticism Metagame : A ...