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.
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 list
15 Science Books That Print Like Design Objects: The Kronecker Wallis Catalog — A small publisher in Barcelona turns the most important texts in the history of science — Newton, Euclid, Gauss, Turing — into design objects.
Book list
17 Equations That Changed the World — From Pythagoras to chaos theory — the seventeen short lines holding up the skeleton of civilization, and where each one still lives in everyday life.
Mathematics · Physics
Physics Books Recommended by a Harvard Physics Student — Furkan Öztürk's four-year reading list — the books a Harvard physics student actually used, from Feynman and Kleppner to Jackson, Sakurai, and Ashcroft & Mermin.
Book list
A Self-Learner's Roadmap Through 30+ Great Math Books — Not a pile of recommendations. A path — the order to read in, the choices to make, and the places people quietly give up.
Book listArticles
Good Internet. Just Curated.
Long reads and sharp essays — science, math, and the web worth your attention.
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NewThe 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.
NewThe History of Mathematics, Written in the MarginsFrom a student's clay tablet to the prize Perelman turned down, four thousand years of mathematics copied from hand to hand.
Who Owns the Fruit on an Overhanging Branch?Roman law, an English court, the Turkish Civil Code and the Swedish constitution look at one branch crossing one fence and give four different answers.
NewThe USDA Pomological Watercolor CollectionIn the years when photography could not hold a colour, the US Department of Agriculture hired painters to record the country's fruit, and fifty-six years later it was left with an archive of 7,497 pages.
New1/998001: The Fraction That Lists Every Number but 998Divide 1 by 998001 and every three-digit number from 000 to 999 falls out after the decimal point in order, all except one.
The Best Calculators for Calculus StudentsWhen you are working through derivatives and integrals, the machine's job is not to hand you the answer. It is to let you see the thing you are thinking about.
Beyond Euclid
Abakcus, but delivered.
One email a week, handpicked by Ali. 235 issues so far.
#235Read 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
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.
Play
Brilliant Labs Halo — Brilliant Labs' 40-gram open-source glasses — a color micro-OLED in the corner of the lens, an on-device AI processor, and every design file sitting on GitHub.
Books
Long reads, bound.
Math, science, and voices that reward slow pages — the shelf we steal from between essays.
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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
A Mathematician's Apology
G. H. Hardy
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.
25 Short Math Books You Can Finish in One Sitting
Book list · Abakcus
Every one of them under 200 pages — classics, modern picks, novels, and a three-book starting route.
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.