Good for nothing·Good for everything
What Is Mathematics Good For? — Nobody loves a thing because it is useful. A manifesto on why mathematics is good for nothing — and, for that very reason, good for everything.
ManifestoFor curious minds
The good side of the internet.
Long reads on mathematics, science, and corners of the web that still feel human — picked slowly, written by 
Ali with a light touch, and meant to stick with you after you close the tab.
22 Original Math Papers You Can Read for Free — From Euler to Perelman, 22 papers that changed mathematics, each with its journal, language, page count and a free link to the original.
Mathematics · History
The History of Mathematics, Written in the Margins — From a student's clay tablet to the prize Perelman turned down, four thousand years of mathematics copied from hand to hand.
Mathematics · History
Free Physics Textbooks from Universities and Physicists — 223 textbooks and lecture notes that physicists and universities give away, from a first look at motion to string theory, sorted by subject, level and kind.
Book list
Free Math Textbooks from University Mathematicians — 125 textbooks that mathematicians give away on their own pages, from high school algebra to graduate analysis, sorted by subject, level and format.
Book list
17 Best Books About Bees, Beekeeping, and Honeybees — Swarm democracy, the waggle dance, honey-hunting history, and three novels — seventeen books about bees, and what each one actually gives you.
Book listArticles
Good Internet. Just Curated.
Long reads and sharp essays — science, math, and the web worth your attention.
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NewA. Boogert's 1692 Color Book, 271 Years Before PantoneIn 1692 a man in Delft thinned every watercolor with one, two and three parts water and painted them across nearly eight hundred pages. One copy survives.
NewPenrose Triangle: Why the Impossible Triangle Can't ExistThree beams that close on paper and never close in the world, from Reutersvärd's nine cubes to Escher's Waterfall and a five-dimensional embedding.
NewThe Coffer Illusion and the Sixteen Circles Between the PanelsSixteen circles sit in plain sight in Anthony Norcia's Coffer illusion, yet most of us see only rectangles. Line ends, shading, and the Pantheon's 140 coffers.
NewHumans since 1982: A Million TimesThe Stockholm studio that lines up analog clocks and makes them write the time.
The Unit Circle Inside the 3-4-5 TriangleThe largest circle that fits inside the right triangle with sides 3, 4 and 5 has a radius of exactly 1. There are three ways to see this, and the third one leads straight to the numbers 1, 2 and 3.
NewJuggler juggling juggling jugglersHow siteswap, the notation jugglers use, packs seven balls, two heights and two private balls per hand into the three digits 966.
Beyond Euclid
Abakcus, but delivered.
One email a week, handpicked by Ali. 236 issues so far.
#236Read it →
Videos
Moving pictures worth your time.
Lectures, short films and documentaries that explain one thing properly.
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Video · Mathematics · Physics
Lissajous Curves Explained: From Tuning Forks to Lidar
Tie two perpendicular oscillations to a single point and the pattern it draws tells you the ratio of the two frequencies and the phase between them.
Video · Woodwork · Puzzles
Kagen Sound's Puzzle Boxes: The Maze Is Not in the Box
Kagen Sound builds wooden puzzle boxes with no nails and no metal parts. What he is actually building is a maze, and the maze is not on the box.
Video · Kinetic Sculpture
Caterpillar with Chariot: Reuben Margolin's 20-Year Problem
Reuben Margolin's eighteen-foot wooden caterpillar came out of a math problem that took twenty years, started by a caterpillar he saw in Utah in 1994.
Video · Number Theory
What Is the Riemann Hypothesis? A 16-Minute Explanation
Alex Kontorovich takes someone with no advanced mathematics and, in sixteen minutes, leaves them genuinely understanding the greatest unsolved problem in the field.
Video · Physics · Photography
Why a Cat Always Lands on Its Feet
In 1894 Étienne-Jules Marey dropped a cat in front of a camera and ended the most stubborn physics argument of the nineteenth century.
Video · Geometry · Illusion
Impossible Triangle Explained: Henry Segerman's Real-Life Model
The impossible (Penrose) triangle can't exist. Henry Segerman built one anyway — then lit it in the one way that gives the cheat away.
Gadgets
Small wonders. Big clicks.
Curated gadgets from the web — clever, useful, and a little fun, handpicked for your attention.
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Desk
TICKEY — A 45-gram aluminum card with a 3.7-inch color e-paper screen. It doesn't glow, doesn't buzz, and keeps its picture even with the battery dead. The wallet photo, brought into this century.
Desk
Mark II — A highlighter-shaped scanner that carries a sentence from a paper book to your phone. John Locke was doing the same job in 1685 with a two-page index.
Play
Stampville — Aurélien Débat's city in a matchbox — 25 rubber stamps and two ink pads, yellow and blue, that quietly make a third colour where they overlap.
Play
Bauhaus Chess Set — In Josef Hartwig's 1924 Bauhaus set the shape of each piece shows how it moves and its volume shows how much it is worth — geometry written as a rulebook.
Desk
Craighill Metrolog — A CNC-milled aluminium ruler carrying inch and millimetre scales on one body — and across eight inches they land on the same line exactly once, at five inches.
Books
Long reads, bound.
Math, science, and voices that reward slow pages — the shelf we steal from between essays.
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10 Chairs
Dominique Ehrhard
The Future of the Responsible Company
Vincent Stanley & Yvon Chouinard
Pictures by #TheStormpilot
Santiago Borja
The Lives of Bees
Thomas D. Seeley
The Beauty of Numbers in Nature
Ian Stewart
Werner's Nomenclature of Colours
Patrick Syme
Life's Devices
Steven Vogel
99 Variations on a Proof
Philip Ording
Free Physics Textbooks from Universities and Physicists
Book list · Abakcus
223 free physics textbooks and lecture notes, sorted by subject, level, format and kind.
Free Math Textbooks from University Mathematicians
Book list · Abakcus
125 free textbooks from university mathematicians, sorted by subject, level and format.
The 17 Best Books for Learning Mathematical Proofs
Book list · Abakcus
A reading order for anyone moving from computing answers to writing proofs, from the first textbook all the way to Gödel.
68 Best Geometry Books for Mathematicians and Designers
Book list · Abakcus
The beautiful, the rigorous, and the hard to find — six shelves running from Byrne's colored Euclid to the geometry of pasta.
Tools
Tools worth the tab.
Handpicked apps, sites, and extensions from the open web — useful, odd, and worth bookmarking.
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How Many People Are in Space Right Now? — One question, one huge numeral. Today it says ten — and it hasn't said zero since October 2000.
Fall Foliage Prediction Map — Every US county, coloured week by week from no change to past peak — and the 1918 four-day rule that explains the pattern.
A Quiet Place to Learn Mathematics — About 250 mathematics entries, every figure drawn by hand and downloadable as an SVG. One person wrote it all, and gave the whole thing away.
The Map of Mathematics — Quanta Magazine mapped the living frontier of mathematical research — 41 nodes, four territories, every connection a link to original reporting.
Pattern Radio: Whale Songs — Google AI and NOAA opened 8,000 hours of underwater recordings to anyone with a browser. Scroll through a year of ocean. Find the whales.
Save Everything. Organize Nothing. — mymind auto-tags every link, image, and note you save — then finds them when you search. No folders. No system. Just save.