The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy...- Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
Franchement, j'sais pas.
But if you knew who you were, wouldn't that be boring?
I was born in Lagos, Nigeria and moved to Manchester with my family when I was 15. I now live in London.
Looking back, I've always enjoyed understanding how things work. One of my earliest memories is dismantling my dad's workstation at around seven years old after convincing myself I could put it back together. I reached the point of no return in about five minutes.
Ironically, I didn't always like school. Before university, much of it centered on rote learning and memorisation (which I find very hard if I don't have a strong interest) I've always found it easier to learn by understanding rather than remembering.
That naturally drew me towards mathematics. I liked that there was little room for hand-waving: either you understood something or you didn't. I'm now working towards building a strong mathematical foundation that will let me tackle problems across the many fields that interest me [See Interests].
My first real exposure to applied mathematics came through Stanford's CS231n which I worked through during the COVID lockdowns when I was 13. It sparked my research in machine learning research and its applications to the science. Around the same time, I also became fascinated by computational finance after learning about the VIX and watching it spike during the pandemic.
Jack of all trades master of none...
though oftentimes better than master of one.- 17th Century compliment turned insult.
The truth is, I don't think I ever chose this. I just can't seem to stay mentally confined to one thing for very long. I'll become obsessed with a topic, disappear down the rabbit hole and beffore long something adjacent catches my attention. The threads just keep on spawning and I am bound to pull on them.
When people think of polymaths, they usually think of Leonardo da Vinci. Painter, engineer, anatomist, inventor, etc. This is a good picture however, what fascinates me is that somehow, he seemed unwilling to treat all these fields as separate. Curiosity was not confined by disciplines.
That's why I'm drawn to lateral thinking. Borrowing ideas, abstractions and ways of reasoning from one field and applying them to another. The hardest part of thinking like this is learning to translate problems from one domain to another without losing context.
Maybe I'll eventually dedicate my life to a single discipline. Maybe I won't. Either way, I hope I never lose the curiosity that keeps pulling me towards unfamilliar ideas. This becomes exponentially more important the older I get.
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