Abstract Nonsense

A retrospective look at my 2021 University of Melbourne vacation research project on minimum Euclidean skeletons, a geometric graph theory optimisation problem.

We construct a Deterministic Finite Automaton that recognises the set of arbitrary-length valid card numbers as per the Luhn check digit algorithm and abuse reality to derive an (executable!) regex with millions of characters.

I scripted the extraction of dictionary definitions from macOS’ built-in Oxford Dictionary archive to automate my new-vocabulary blog page. As all good automation projects, I probably spent more time automating the process than it would’ve taken to do it manually.

It’d be a bit imprecise to define a measure on the set of open problems, but I’d wager that it is much larger than the set of solved problems.

One such open conjecture is the Hadamard matrix problem, an unsolved problem in mathematics that keeps me up at night. Do square matrices \(H\) with entries \(\pm 1\) satisfying \(HH^T = nI_n\) exist for all \(n = 4k\)? The smallest unknown case is of order 668; like Order 66, but for mathematicians instead of Jedi.

This is a living blog in which I collect new words I encounter through my reading or the random walk of daily life. I’ve got a few hundred words here now - the more arcane, archaic, or abstruse the better.

Abusing git pathing to make repositories more portable. This is not idiomatic, but it works for adhoc data science projects.

How I built a mobile-friendly blogging workflow using GitHub Issues, with automated deployment via GitHub Actions and Cloudflare Pages and got featured in GitHub’s IssueOps Docs.

Debugging an internet issue led me into the dark arts of DNS and an afternoon benchmarking DNS resolvers.