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.
Free Math Courses on Coursera: The 26 Worth Taking — Twenty-six Coursera math courses from Stanford, Penn, Imperial and Johns Hopkins, sorted into a curriculum, with what free really means on Coursera now.
Learning · Online Courses
30 Best Coffee Table Books for Science, Math & Design Lovers — A coffee table book has one job: to be opened by someone who did not plan to open it. These thirty do that job, and then they teach you something.
Book List · Coffee Table Books
18 Books Einstein Recommended: From Euclid to Dostoevsky — Einstein never wrote a reading list. He left something better: the books that changed him, the ones he argued over in Bern, and the ones he wrote prefaces for.
Book List · Einstein
How to Learn Mathematics: A Self-Study Roadmap — Nine undergraduate courses, nearly 70 books, a prerequisite map and a study planner for learning mathematics on your own.
Mathematics · Self-Study
12 Books About a Single Number: π, e, i, φ and Infinity — π, e, i, the golden ratio, Euler’s constant, √2, infinity, 137 and absolute zero — twelve books, each the biography of a single number.
Book listArticles
Good Internet. Just Curated.
Long reads and sharp essays — science, math, and the web worth your attention.
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A. 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.
NewFree Math Courses on Coursera: The 26 Worth TakingTwenty-six Coursera math courses from Stanford, Penn, Imperial and Johns Hopkins, sorted into a curriculum, with what free really means on Coursera now.
NewHomeschool Math: A Complete Guide for ParentsEverything parents ask about homeschooling math: how it works, what the law asks, curriculum compared, elementary to high school, supplies, costs and the hard days.
Humans 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.
NewList of People Who Have Walked on the MoonTwelve men, six landings, three and a half years. Who they were, where they stood, and how many of them are still here.
Beyond Euclid
Abakcus, but delivered.
One email a week, handpicked by Ali. 238 issues so far.
#238Read it →
Videos
Moving pictures worth your time.
Lectures, short films and documentaries that explain one thing properly.
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Video · Physics · Richard Feynman
The Feynman Series, Beauty: Does Science Ruin a Flower?
Richard Feynman's 1981 voice, laid over ice, mountains and blooming flowers. An artist friend told him science leaves a flower dull. His answer has been bothering me, pleasantly, for years.
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.
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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The Beautiful Brain
Drawings by Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Making Camp
Martin Hogue
The Architecture of Trees
Cesare Leonardi & Franca Stagi
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
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.