Online presence

I've been thinking about this site and my presence online. At some point in my life I became interested in mathematics and for better or worse decided to pursue it as a career (we all, who participate in this globalized world, need a career). Just as any other science, being a mathematician means reading and learning a lot of things and, the human brain being what it is, this necessitates making notes of the things that I learn so that I can look back on them whenever needed. A textbook isn't enough because most of the times I will need to write things in my own way to understand it better, or I'll need to note down some "Aha" moments so as to not forget them. Secondly, making my own notes would mean that I'd know exactly where to find the thing I'm looking for, rather than combing through books I may have learnt from.

30-40 years ago I would have just written things down on paper and 30-40 years ago mathematics was not as developed and rich as it is today. In any case, here and now, I have access to computers and LaTeX to make really neat notes, so I learnt how to LaTeX and made notes. For a while these were just stored on my computer. Taking inspiration from people like Tao and Keith Conrad and to make myself visible to the people who were in the position to admit me into grad schools for my PhD (this is a very modern issue), it seemed natural to make a website to host all my notes.

As made clear in another post I chose GitHub mainly for greater control. Since then I have posted my notes, and I have a bunch of things I'm working on which I will post when they are done (or never), I have also written out some things that are more "personal". But what is the future of this site?

Firstly, GitHub repos have a size limit of 1GB, so most essays are fine, I compress all the photos (this also works as a IP protection in some ways, but not quite) and I will probably never be posting videos. Even so, this website probably won't be huge. At the time of writing this, this website is around 260MB which isn't a lot, but I'm a little more than a fifth of the way there. Eventually I might have to move the photos to a different cloud so as to keep my GitHub site, or I may migrate the entire website elsewhere.

I will probably never upload something with someone's face in it (especially if that someone is me) as a means to protect privacy. And in the same vein, I will not be posting anything personal; and this holds for any other place on the internet. As an aside, I'd like to mention that at the time of writing, I'm not active on any social media, save WhatsApp, nor do I plan on joining them (for readers from the future who may have stumbled on my little corner, right now Elon Musk bought Twitter and ... it has been interesting). I am on LinkedIn, but personally LinkedIn feels like a farce and I cannot take it seriously.

What am I going to do with this? I looked at John Baez's page, Taos's page and I think I want to do something similar, i.e., a repository of things that I learnt, things that I'm reading, and my thoughts on them. Of course, I don't expect to reach anything similar to what they have (and they've been at it for decades now), but the idea is that this will be my little corner for me to look back on most of the things that I learnt at some point. If, like I have found other people's sites useful, this is useful for someone, that's good. But at the end of the day, this is my online journal. Of course, there is no obligation to post every little thing, so it will be things that I feel are important to be recorded somewhere.

This begs the question: why a website? Why not just a digital diary on my computer? Well, firstly, unlike 2-3 generations back, I need a digital diary to keep track of things because there are too many things to keep track of on paper (and it would be too much paper). Secondly, an online space is one that is potentially visied by others. Just as there's a motivation to clean a house when there are visitors, there's a motivation to keep things neatly organised and maintain regularly. And a last minor point is that this is somewhat of an opportunity for me to learn how to maintain a website and write better.