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Enrico

@jfnash_

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As I was catching the last bus before the summer break, I found myself thinking about something that has happened constantly and naturally over the past year, namely how I spend my time on the bus. The journey doesn’t take long (say 20–25 minutes), but it does take the time needed to sit down, and, once seated, things take on different forms and voices. On the one hand, my attention subsides; on the other, it expands. Whereas I used to often find myself reading a book, skimming through a musical score or listening to music to shut out the chaos, the noise and, above all, people (the tone of their voices, their disgusting coughs and the even more reprehensible lack of substance in their conversations), for more than 300 days now it feels as though I’m entering a state of frantic meditation every single time. I don’t feel the need for music to block out the reality around me. I don’t feel the need for a visual focus to shield my hearing from my surroundings. I sit down and a neural trance sets in, where the frenzy plays an electrifying role in my thoughts. I see but do not process, I hear but do not interpret; I simply think, traveling rapidly through the wormholes that connect the rooms of the universes in my mind, recalling a conversation that took place 14 months ago, mentally re-reading the lyrics of a song (in time with the beat) whilst my neurons conduct the orchestra or, why not, by thinking back on how a game of chess might have gone, or on the statement of a theorem, wondering about its true implications, counting the seconds between stops, trying to work out the cube root of 117, playing “what if” or I switch everything off. A false void, because the reality around me isn’t static; rather, it’s a local void that condenses the journey into a series of frames. And in an instant, I get off the bus. And I’m just serene. This year, 31 July falls on a Friday, and the end of the month coincides with the last actual working day of the academic year before the summer break. Perhaps that sense of serenity, permeated by, or perhaps arising from, or provoked or fuelled by, the nostalgia and melancholy of this time of year is a reflection of the beauty of t by @jfnash_
3
2 months ago
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</ Delusions of Grandeur > Ecco un laconico sunto della vita: · L’assoluto non dialoga. · L’unica luce è l’oscurità. · L’impulso distruttivo è creativo. · La speranza non è una strategia. · La parole roboanti mascherano il nulla. · Le domande non sono mai indiscrete; le risposte lo sono, a volte. · L’unica moralità in un mondo crudele è il caso: imparziale, privo di pregiudizi, equo. by @jfnash_
3
4 months ago
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So, the fact is to understand that I cannot choose what I work on. I cannot follow through on a line of thinking just because I want to or because it’s needed. I simply have to work on what’s in my head. I deeply think back in time sometimes, and realise that it has always been like this, from high school and even earlier: something catches me and then deep down into the rabbit hole, leaving all the rest aside or behind. Loss of the sense of time, antisocial behaviour, theoretical algorithms for days. No breaks, almost no sleep, junk food, forgetting about everyday life and useless gizmos, phone, texts, the life outside. Days pass, hyper focus mode on and weeks are done in days. When the spark of interest flares up and ignites, and obsession is on the verge of bursting forth, the real folly is to stifle it, push it aside for a while, or even extinguish it altogether because “its time is not yet right”. 
Obsession is what people need, that something that keeps you awake, or that sets you alight whilst you’re awake and all of a sudden the world is on mute. I dream of a world of obsessed people. by @jfnash_
2
6 months ago
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Many years have passed, but I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was very young, and I had the illusion that human intelligence could achieve anything. And so I threw myself into my studies beyond measure. Not satisfied with reading many books, I spent half the night meditating on the most abstruse questions. A severe nervous breakdown forced me to slow down. Cities, full of temptations for my exhausted brain, are not for me. I would rather take refuge in the distant countryside. A life that is not animalistic, but not too vegetative either: reading, writing, greeting my feathered friends, walking; the essentials. And then looking at the ceiling as I did on those evenings. Ceiling, or white walls, where I read what I am writing with my thoughts. A white wall, which, together with the silence that dwells and dominates outside the house, allows me to see clearly. This is the beauty of it: the thick foliage of the trees in the nearby park, the true blackness I see when I open the window at night, the quiet human works of human sounds in the neighbourhood that are never annoying: a sine wave of work and rest of equally quiet people. The mysterious charm of not belonging to the city will always live within me, reflected in its image of not desiring any city, chaotic, cramped, full of... humans who, with their thoughts and their crazy agitation, distract me and make me collapse into oblivion due to my limited ability to tolerate lights, colours, sounds, voices, thoughts, noises, changes in air, variations in pressure. Susceptible to gradients, to variations in quantity that come up behind you like ghosts, holding you back, pulling you into the abyss. by @jfnash_
3
7 months ago
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In mathematics, words are important. Their use is closely related to the context and there are no true synonyms (as in normal language). “Orthogonal,” “perpendicular,” and “normal” are words whose differences are subtle but significant, and it is therefore very important to know how and where to use them. What said takes on a character of necessity and attention when applied to everyday language and expression. Among the categories that define different types of people (if that makes sense), we find those who fear words and those who do not know how to use them. Why do we need to be sensitive when talking about concrete facts? To me it’s nonsense. Why do we have to say “he passed away” or “he is no longer with us” instead of saying “he died”? What are you afraid of? Admitting reality? Not wanting to let go of a fact? Or is it the belief (or idea) that you have to be unnecessarily cautious? Every now and then, I really do spend a few hours thinking about this. My questions are serious ones. I read that lots of people consider those who speak eloquently to be “cringe.” Those who use interesting words and express themselves well are “cringe.” I have always been annoyed by this useless word, which many people use to judge a song, a movie, a speech without knowing when to use it, how to use it, or what it does really mean. Unfortunately, this is where all the expressive dryness comes out. My mindset isn’t 31 years behind today’s. It’s 131 years behind in many areas, and I despise those people for whom their normality is their illiteracy, feeling uneasy about everything that is culture. When there is no bridge between expression and understanding it’s because on one hand, there is too much of both and on the other there is a lack of both. by @jfnash_
4
8 months ago
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</ The Architecture of Silence > I’ve been watching the digital landscape lately, a dismal expanse of zeroes. There’s a strange comfort the new generation finds in the void, a curated silence. Is it peace or is it a surrender of the spirit? Or is it a mirror of an empty mind? For a while, I tried to mirror that silence, convinced that a false vacuum was the logical response to a world that lacks the attention to listen, but I realized my silence wasn’t about a lack of substance; it was a frustration with the lag. My mind operates at a frantic speed, but the human act of writing that lightning down is agonizingly slow, turning my thoughts into a filtered, diluted, dreary version of the original fire. 
 I’ve been playing a psychological game of Wordle, actively trying to slot the different versions of myself from the last six years. I’m testing each mutation, each evolution, and each shift searching for the optimal me, but the word that describes my existence is far too long for any grid, and it remains stubbornly unfinished. My constant state of protective apathy makes me no longer care to dispel the shadows of a world in chaos. The constant noise of this planet’s events and the rapidly increasing superficiality of the people whose mental slowness and lack of depth act as obstacles to my peace have become silent noise. To be constantly tethered to the world is a slow deprivation of a soul, a doleful sacrifice of one’s own essence for the sake of an arid, collective noise. The word of this year will be: chronometer. by @jfnash_
0
9 months ago
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Few days ago I was tidying up my room and I found a sheet of paper with a theorem on it (one of those usual theorems about immersion in strange spaces), and a footnote I had written: “my proof is better”. Youthful pride aside, it reminded me of an important anecdote. 
Once a guy whom I didn’t know and met before (perhaps a student, a PhD, or else) did accidentally attended one of my classes time ago (he had to take a different course in Combinatorial Optimization but he went to the wrong classroom, so he just underwent 110 minutes of Differential Forms and Functional Analysis), attended again the next lesson. Whilst the first time he apologised for having attended the wrong class (I’m still trying to understand the apologies), the second one, in the end, he told me this: “I attended on purpose today, because l was amazed by how you do mathematical proofs. They are limpid and ways easier than the ones I knew.” This is a very small thing in the sea of things, but to me it was like the half of the whole sea of honour. I always spent little time in reading (or worse: studying) proofs from books, except perhaps some which were particularly heavy. I always loved to understand the logic within with elementary methods when possible. Sometimes I got “better” results, often interlocking and intersecting different branches and tools of mathematics, whilst other times I complicated my life. Either ways, it was a win for even in complicating things I could admire and stare at the beauty of something that could be read and written in high-flown language as well as beggars language. If this is not fun then I don’t know what it is! by @jfnash_
0
9 months ago
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“Every positive integer is one of Ramanujan’s personal friends”. This is how Littlewood spoke of the brilliant Indian mathematician. I certainly don’t compare myself to him, but even for me numbers are unique friends that I meet everywhere and in particular each one-digit number is unique, from zero to nine. Their uniqueness lies in their colour. 5 is a lava red, whereas 2 is a more electric blue (not too much). Multi-digit numbers keep the individual colours instead. Scientists define this visual, and sometimes emotional, experience of numbers with the term “synesthesia”, a neurological mixture of the senses that can manifest itself in many forms in reality: from seeing a smell in the form of colors, to perceiving a sound in the form odor, as well as seeing letters and / or numbers in colours and so on. It happened that all this was mistaken for a game, by some people, a puzzle game like to find the best colour-number combination; for me the colours are really there, whether I want it or not, and they are mine (other synesthetic people may see different colours or have different manifestations). Some say that thanks to this condition math skills are clearly above average, but in my opinion that’s not true. Maths is not knowing that 7π/2 is bigger than π^2, or being able to mentally compute 37•92 in a short time. Mathematical skills are quite another thing. One thing that is certain is the annoyance that sometimes arises caused by the presence of colours for a colour that does not correspond to my experience of it, such as reading “all at 99 cents” in red (instead of navy blue). by @jfnash_
0
a year ago
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How Game Theory can be applied to casual relationships? Not a tricky question, Game Theory can indeed be applied to well… anything. Between friends, what’s the strategic goal? After all, there is no commodity being sought, ok? There is no prize to be won, so what do you play for? The answer is actually easier than you think: even the most casual relationship is built around a very important “priceless” commodity: information. When you share personal information, you’re making a strategic move. You’re betting that your friends will cooperate and not use it against you, then they, in turn, are expected to share their own information with you creating a cycle of reciprocity. Since the currency is not money but it’s vulnerability, you play for trust which is the foundation of partnerships between countries, corporations, lovers and friends. Contrarily to other games, the only winning strategy here is a positive cooperation, that is, a symmetric exchange of information where all the players equally do share. Such symmetry is seldom reached (and it would make the problem rather trivial), whence the real question(s): what is the best way to preserve a high level of trust between 2+ people without having to share everything? When there is too much information, junks and redundancies do appear. What shall one say and not say to “achieve trust” from another person? How does it vary from person to person? What can one omit (i.e. say later)? 

More questions = more constraints and again we fall into an optimization problem in which human behaviour is taken into account, and we all do know that those problems are the hardest ones. [Photo: The theory of Games and Economic Behaviour - J. Von Neumann, O. Morgenstern - one of the most amazing lectures ever {the above text is NOT taken from that book, just personal random thoughts}]. by @jfnash_
2
a year ago
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[Part 1] I was a very lively kid. “Too much” lively. That much, that one of my teacher adviced my mother for taking me to a psychologist in order to understand “why I was like I was”. Sounds like a sort of personality paradox, it was about my behaviour: lively is a fancy word; I could not stay still, I always bothered the other children, walking thought the desks observing what others were doing, and once I even did start to correct their class test with a pen, writing marks, before they handed over the assignment to the teacher. The psychologist time came. A big fancy room, in the city centre. An attic perhaps, rather astounding. Predominant colours were blue and black, also funny because there was even a ball with blue pentagons and black hexagons drawn on it. I remember some tests, like “recognise numerical paths” or “simple logic tests”; many questions about me, trying to catch my attention. About school, schoolmates… “Has a shorten attention span and he gets easily distracted, but only in those things he doesn’t care of”. Yes, this has always been my main thing. Applied to people it makes me to get bored fast when nothing interesting occurs. In tasks, homework or in studying it usually degenerates in two ways: either I lose interest and I really have to make huge efforts, or I could keep doing for hours, even days, sleeping very little. Rabbit hole. When little I was forced to sleep, but I had hard times in falling asleep so I thought about things, and because in elementary school at those times we were facing multiplications, I had fun with mental operations of this kind, and I never lost the verve of this. by @jfnash_
0
a year ago
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Più studi, più nozioni acquisisci, più sai e meno sai. Aumentando il volume della tua conoscenza, aumenta lo spazio, per definizione. Aumentando lo spazio aumenta la possibilità di riempirlo, e le particelle che prima stavano bene in un volume V, ora si trovano rarefatte in un volume kV dove k > 1. Particelle = nozioni. 
Volume = capacità di ragionamento e pensiero, sinapsi. Lo spazio vuoto è molto maggiore di quello costituito dalle particelle, e vi è necessità, per quelli come noi, di riempirlo. Ma riempirlo implica, per costruzione, aumentare ancora il volume (inserendo altre particelle nel mentre). È un ciclo senza fine, se non la morte, che rende la persona intelligente entusiasta e briosa molto triste, molto amara al limite di un grande sconforto, consolata solo dalle scintille elettrizzanti dovute al continuo aumento di particelle, ma è un circolo vizioso; è la lotta tra gravità e termodinamica. Ciò nondimeno, se non ci infuocassimo sotto lo spirito delle nostre passioni resteremmo delle mediocri fiaccole e questo è inaccettabile. §-§-§-§-§-§-§-§-§-§-§ The more you study and acquire knowledge, the more you realise how much you don’t know. Increasing the volume of your knowledge increases the space, by definition. This increases the possibility of filling the space, meaning that the particles which previously fit comfortably in a volume V are now sparse in a volume kV where k > 1. Particles = knowledge. 
Volume = the capacity for reasoning and thought, or synapses. The empty space far exceeds that occupied by the particles, and we need to fill it. However, filling it implies, by definition, an increase in volume (through the insertion of additional particles). It is an endless cycle, except for death, which makes intelligent, enthusiastic and lively people very sad and bitter, to the point of despair. The only consolation is the electrifying sparks caused by the continuous increase in particles. However, it is a vicious circle: it is the struggle between gravity and thermodynamics. Nevertheless, if we did not burn with passion, we would remain mediocre, and this is unacceptable. taken in Dipartimento di Matematica Università di Bologna by @jfnash_
13
a year ago
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Questo e niente esami per i prossimi 7 mesi taken in Toscana, Italy by @jfnash_
2
a month ago
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