Six Books That Taught π How to Misbehave — History, obsession, category theory — and Sir Cumference.
Book listFor 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.
Seven questions, June 7, 1869 — MIT's first algebra entrance exam. The questions haven't changed. Everything else has.
Mathematics
Rafael Araujo's 20+ Mesmerizing Geometrical Masterpieces — Rafael Araujo spends 100 hours on a single drawing — no software, no undo. A selection of his most stunning hand-drawn golden ratio illustrations.
Mathematics · Art
24 Beautiful Physics Poster Designs That Inspire You — String theory, quantum mechanics, entropy — 24 poster designs that turn physics concepts into beautiful objects worth hanging on a wall.
Physics · Design
A tree on a barge, crossing the Black Sea — Salomé Jashi's documentary on a billionaire who collected ancient trees — uprooted, shipped, replanted.
Documentary
The Equations That Forgot They Were Equations — Alejandro Guijarro photographed quantum mechanics blackboards at Cambridge, Oxford, CERN, and Stanford. No staging. Just what the physicists left behind.
Photography · Science
Drawing a Chair 64 Times — Erich Dieckmann's 1931 morphological matrix — 8 rows, 64 variations, from rigid geometry to near-abstraction.
Design · Bauhaus
The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid — Red, yellow, blue, black. Euclid in colour. Before Mondrian, before the Bauhaus — 1847.
Books · Geometry
The Woman Who Was Right — In 1990, Marilyn vos Savant answered a probability puzzle correctly. Nearly 10,000 people wrote to tell her she was wrong.
Probability · History
Cymatics: Sound Has a Shape — Nigel Stanford wrote the music last — after the physics decided the notes.
Physics · MusicGood Internet. Just Curated.
Long reads and sharp essays — science, math, and the web worth your attention.
The Clock That Reads You BackA desk clock that tells time through literary quotes. E-paper, white oak, brass. $996K on Kickstarter. Sold at MoMA. It has parental controls. All of these things are true.
The Equations That Forgot They Were EquationsAlejandro Guijarro spent three years photographing quantum mechanics blackboards at Cambridge, Stanford, CERN, and Oxford. No staging. Just the board.
How Magritte Broke Perception Without Breaking a Single RuleIn 1965, Magritte painted a woman on horseback through a forest. Everything is real. Nothing is possible. A 2023 study in the Journal of Vision finally explains exactly how he did it.
Drawing a Chair 64 TimesErich Dieckmann's 1931 morphological matrix: 8 rows, 64 variations, from rigid geometry to near-abstraction. The clearest single-page argument for design research the Bauhaus produced.
Feynman on How Math Should Be Taught to ChildrenIn 1965, Feynman read 500 pounds of math textbooks and wrote the sharpest critique in the history of mathematics education. Sixty years later, the problem is still with us.
The Astronomy Textbook That Outlived an EmpireWritten one year before its author died in the Mongol conquest of Khwarazm, al-Jaghmini's Mulakhkhas became the most widely copied Arabic astronomy textbook ever made.
Data · Visualization
Kung Fu Motion Visualization
Tobias Gremmler turned motion-capture data from Kung Fu masters into five moving sculptures. Veri heykel oldu; zaman kumaş, hız madde.
Physics · Music
Cymatics: Sound Has a Shape
Nigel Stanford wrote the music last — after the physics decided the notes.
Physics · Football
The Physics of Roberto Carlos's Free Kick
136 km/h, 14 revolutions per second. Four French physicists spent 13 years explaining what happened next.
Video
Ode to a Flower
In two minutes, Feynman dismantles the idea that science strips nature of beauty. Understanding a flower doesn't subtract from it — it multiplies.
Video · Nature
The Owl That Isn’t There
Three overlapping noise-cancellation systems, sixty million years in the making. A bird crosses a field at night, and the air keeps its secret.
Video · Meditation
A Drawing That Erases Itself
Yuki Kawae spends hours raking patterns into a sand garden in his apartment, then smooths them away. 23 minutes. No narration. The calculations stop.
Film · Movie
Los Cronocrímenes
One nervous man. One hour. A bathtub full of white liquid. Nacho Vigalondo's trap is airtight.
Film · Mathematics
Stand and Deliver
The testing board assumed they cheated. The students re-sat the exam. They passed again. This time no one said anything.
Film · Mathematics
Good Will Hunting
A janitor at MIT solves a research-level math problem in chalk on a hallway wall. The film is entirely uninterested in the mathematics.
Film · Movie
Rushmore
Max Fischer is failing every class. He is also the founder of eleven clubs. Wes Anderson's best argument that how you spend your attention is who you are.
Small wonders. Big clicks.
Curated gadgets from the web — clever, useful, and a little fun, handpicked for your attention.
100% read
Author Clock — A desk clock that tells time through literary quotes. E-paper display, white oak housing, brass base. It raised nearly a million dollars on Kickstarter and is sold at MoMA.
100% read
Bambu Lab P2S — Platonic solids, Fibonacci spirals, bridge load tests. The printer that makes abstract math something a child can hold.
100% read
Martin's Chocolatier Chocolate Planets — Nine handmade Belgian truffles. Eight planets plus the Sun. Zero Pluto.
100% read
xTool F1 Ultra — Two lasers, one desk. Fiber for metal, diode for wood — both at research-grade precision.
100% read
Hagoromo Fulltouch Chalk — A Stanford professor cleared Amazon overnight. It was just chalk. Or was it?
Reading list
Long reads, bound.
Math, science, and voices that reward slow pages — the shelf we steal from between essays.
Six Books That Taught π How to Misbehave
Book list
History, obsession, category theory, a novella — and a knight named Sir Cumference.
How Smart Machines Think
Sean Gerrish
Written in 2018, before ChatGPT. The foundations it explains are still the floor every modern AI stands on.
Islamic Geometric Patterns
Eric Broug
A compass, a ruler, and 1,400 years of quiet geometry. 23 patterns from real buildings.
Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
Written in Brixton Prison in 1918. What is the number 3? Russell takes six months and 208 pages to answer it with precision.
The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid
Oliver Byrne · TASCHEN
Red, yellow, blue, black. Euclid in colour. Before Mondrian, before the Bauhaus — 1847.
Pasta by Design
George L. Legendre
92 pasta shapes. 3 parametric equations each. No recipes at all.
The Geometry of Pasta
Caz Hildebrand & Jacob Kenedy
Shape is not aesthetic — shape is the mathematics of flavour.
The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel
Willmann & Voss · TASCHEN
450 plates. Radiolarians, jellyfish, ferns. Art Nouveau before Art Nouveau had a name.
Sorular
Questions worth a pause.
Tiny puzzles and gentle brain-twists — each one fits in a coffee break. No grades; just the fun of figuring it out.
Tools worth the tab.
Handpicked apps, sites, and extensions from the open web — useful, odd, and worth bookmarking.
View all tools
Every Raindrop Has a Destination — Click anywhere in the world and watch where water goes — from hilltop to ocean
12,795 Objects, One Life — Barbara Iweins photographed everything she owns. The spreadsheet knows things she didn't.
299 Products. One Graveyard. — Google has retired 299 products since 2006. The pattern is not random.
Statistics You Can Watch Think — A Brown University student made probability visible — and changed how a generation understands statistics.
Your Favorite Fry Is a Geometry Problem — A 3D scrollytelling tool that walks through every major fry shape and explains exactly why you prefer it. The answer is a surface-to-volume ratio.
The Color the Forest Already Had — 825 colors, 40+ dye mushrooms. Julie Beeler’s atlas of natural color that exists only because a specific fungus grew in a specific place.
Your Name, Written by Earth — NASA spells out your name using real Landsat satellite images of Earth's surface. Every letter is a real place with coordinates.
Every Minute Has a Book — 1,440 minutes in a day. Each one matched to a passage from world literature. Check the time, read a sentence.
What One Fool Can Do, Another Can — Silvanus P. Thompson wrote a calculus book in 1910. Someone converted it to HTML by hand. It's free and it still works.
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