My name is Fill Staley; and welcome to my new website! I am a Ph.D. candidate in the mathematics department at the University of Oregon in Eugene, OR, USA. I study partial differential equations with Micah Warren; but currently I am on leave to recover from burnout. In stepping away from my research-level mathematics, I want to return to some of the other things that I really enjoy learning about and that I feel I have let wither-on-the-vine at the expense of my graduate pursuits. Moreover, I want to develope new ways to share what I learn with others.
So credentials aside, allow me to introduce myself and talk about why I want to create this website.
Introduction
In a word, I would describe myself as a polymath; an amateur polymath, if I had two words. I am naturally curious about most everything. It is not so much that I seek to know about everything, but when I learn about something new, I almost always want to find out more. I generally believe that anything someone is willing to commit to serious study is, if by that fact alone, interesting. The universe is vast, and I love to learn about it all.
But there is a pun in this description for myself, because I particularly love to learn about math. I find it quite hard to express what exactly it is I mean by ‘mathematics’, because it is, and always has been, more than just solving equations or proving theorems; more than critical reasoning or logic; and not just a language, although that does get closer. I have always had a rather artistic view of mathematics: seeing it simultaneously as an expression of human creativity and a reflection of the structure of the universe.
My appreciation of mathematics runs very deep. It is almost as if everything I learn about the world, I attempt to anchor in my conception of ‘mathematics’ (as my chosen ‘art’). But I will wax philosophic about mathematics another day; for now let me move on with an analogy and a quote. First, the analogy: the physical universe in which we live our lives, and which contains everything that exists, has existed, or ever shall exist, is the analog version of the digital realm of ‘mathematics’. And now the quote from the mathematician James Sylvester:
Mathematics is not a book confined within a cover and bound between brazen clasps, whose contents it need only patience to ransack; it is not a mine, whose treasures may take long to reduce to possessions, but which fill only a limited number of veins and lodes; it is not a soil, whose fertility can be exhausted by the yield of successive harvests; it is not a continent or an ocean, whose area can be mapped out and its contour defined: it is limitless as the space which it finds too narrow for its aspirations; its possibilities are as infinite as the worlds which are forever crowding in and multiplying upon the astronomer’s gaze; it is as incapable of being restricted within assigned boundaries or being reduced to definitions of permanent validity, as the consciousness, the life, which seems to slumber in each monad, in every atom of matter, in each leaf and bud and cell, and is forever ready to burst forth into new forms of vegetable and animal existence.
Interests
Adjacent to mathematics, I am deeply interested in economics. There is a lot about this huge, almost-living, infinitely complicated system of connections between all human beings, redistributing resources across the globe, that really fascinates me. The way I see it, the economy emerges out of the actions of individuals trying to get what they want through exchange (i.e. not by force), and I enjoy the seemingly impossible challenge of trying to make sense of this emergent phenomenon. I mostly do this through reading a lot of books about economics and articles from The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and the like. But I also do a healthy bit of philosophizing about economics on the side.
Besides about math and economics, I love to read about physics, biology and science more generally; about psychology and philosophy; and history and politics. I really just enjoy reading. I primarily read nonfiction, but I also enjoy science fiction and Russian literature (and other fiction as well, I cannot recommend The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery enough, it is a beautiful novel).
I also listen to a lot of podcasts. I realized months ago (by digging into my podcast app a little) that for the last 4 years I have listened to almost 29 days of podcasts each year. This works out to close to 2 hours per day of podcasts (which made sense when I thought about it, based on how much commuting and things I do while listening to podcasts). Most of this is news, and most of that from The Economist, but also the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Talking Politics from the London Review of Books, and Planet Money from NPR. But I have also listened to Freakonomics for close to 10 years now, and have been enjoying their recent expansion as a network with People I (Mostly) Admire and No Stupid Questions. I really like and recommend No Stupid Questions.
I am a novice programmer and am interested in computer science generally. Through college, my experience with computers was primarily limited to writing papers and playing video games, with the occasionally “fancy” Excel spreadsheet. While working on my Master’s degree, I learned how to use LaTeX for typesetting, and eventually learned a lot about how it works: I have written my own packages and document classes by now. Then a few years ago I began to learn Python, and have recently taken on PowerShell and C++. (Also some dabbling in .Net more broadly.)
I spend a lot of my free time playing video games, which have always been a passion of mine. I like a lot of different games; some of my favorites (in no particular order) are:
- Factorio
- Sid Meier’s Civilization 6
- Horizon Zero Dawn
- Cities: Skylines
- all of the Dark Souls games
I’m also really fond of anything in the Zelda or Pokémon series. I also spend a lot of time hanging out with my friends playing games, watching stuff, and talking about life, the universe and everything. Physically, I enjoy swing dancing, hiking, swimming, and martial arts; but part of what I enjoy about them is doing them with other people which has been difficult the last year during the pandemic. One day I will be able to return to these activities; for now I have heartily embraced a daily constitutional for outdoor activity.
What to expect?
I want to improve my (digital) communication skills. As much as I enjoy learning, I don’t want to horde knowledge to myself, like some dragon of Athena. What makes people unique in their education is not what or how many individual things they know but the cumulative body itself. Odds are, there is no one in the world, past, present, or future, that knows what you know or will know throughout your life. (Of course, at some point in your past you knew nothing, and so there would be brief period of time where you would know the same things as someone else, but eventually you’d be unique in history.)
As such I don’t just want to share the individual things I learn about, but also the connections I draw between them as I look for a deeper understanding of things. In this way, I intend to use this website as a kind of (public) notebook: as a way to record and share what I learn and think about. But also it is an attempt to rediscover and broaden my interests. Part of my burnout from grad school relates to this feeling I’ve had of being myopically focused on mathematics research and not being able to diversify and think about other things.
So this website won’t be about mathematics; but it will be. It won’t be about academic or research math (at least not for a long while). Instead it will be about what I think mathematics is, which is much more inclusive and pervasive. I am rather new to this kind of public exposure of my thoughts, but I hope that over time it will become easier and that I will improve at it. And hopefully inspire some new ideas myself, if not pity in the stars.