The other day, I wanted to explore all finite groups of low order. This is something that has already nicely been done by the Group Explorer project and in the great Group Theory lectures by Richard Borcherds. I wanted to look into this myself and just started by producing multiplication tables of the first small groups. This always feels a bit like doing a Sudoku to me.

I have written before about creativity and I've thought and read about it a bit recently. There are 2 main things that I have recently discovered: First, the idea that quantity leads to quality. I read this article on Austin Kleon's blog (which I think I found via Matt Ragland's newsletter. This idea is as simple as it is evident, the more you practice, the better you get. But as trivial as it sounds, it is also non-trivial at the same time.

This page tests math support.

Last week, I watched the documentary "The world of Thinking" on Vimeo. I chose to watch it because it portraits the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS for short) which is a fascinating place to me. It is located in Princeton, New Jersey, USA, and was the scientific home to many great and well-known mathematicians and theoretical physicists. It does indeed harbor scientists of other disciplines as well but those are of less interest to me. "The Institute", as it is often called, is a special place in that it is the closest implementation of the Ivory Tower of Science. The purpose of the Institute is to allow a few select scientists to focus as good as possible on expanding the boundaries of human knowledge.

If I could write a blog from scratch, what would I write about? Why would I want to write a blog in the first place? I have had a blog in one form or another for many years but I never got into a habit of contiually posting to on them. The obvious answer to the question on what to write about is to write about the things that occupy my mind, that I find interesting or that move me. I guess the only way to learn what I want to write about is to just write about something for a while. Many people advocate this technique and I have tried it before but the attempt died of perfectionism. I guess some of the articles that I have published in my last run were just too ambitious and took too much time to research and prepare. This time I should try to write simpler and more frequent blog posts.