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Essays & Publications


Letters to a Young Technologist


This project was a collaboration with an extraordinary group: Anna Mitchell, Tammy Winter, Saffron Huang, Jasmine Wang, and Maran Nelson. Working together as an Interact Circle we wrote a collection of essays called Letters to a Young Technologist. To quote from the About page:

This project began as a hope for reflection, and a desire for collaboration. We wanted to reflect on our roles and lives as young technologists, and to kindle broader conversations about these topics.

We were driven by the realization that technologists hold an increasingly important position in society, with the capability to change billions of peoples’ life experiences through the tools they build. But the set of ideologies or life-philosophies currently on offer to most people pursuing a career in technology are surprisingly shallow, as is many technologists’ understanding of their field’s history.

This is one small step towards something different: an ethic that prioritizes technologists’ agency, the need for self-reflection, and the importance of historical inquiry.
You can read the full set of essays here.

The Psychological Roots of Political Polarization


I have always been interested in understanding why people believe what they believe, especially when they believe things that are contentious or conspiratorial. For a few years in the mid-2010s I was particularly interested in psychological theories of people’s beliefs (I am now substantially more interested in the role of culture and institutions). I ended up writing an article on ths topic with Mishti Sharma. Here it is: Why We Can’t All Get Along: The Psychological Roots of Politial Polarization.

Exponentiation: Cooler Than You Thought

One of my favorite things about math is taking simple concepts like exponentiation and applying them to things that don’t initially appear exponentiable. It’s all well and good to raise something to power of 3, but what would it mean to raise something to the power of....a matrix? Or to the power of...the derivative operator? I explore that question in the Exponentiation: Cooler than you Thought, which I wrote for the Canadian Undergraduate Mathematical Society’s publication Notes from the Margin in 2018.



Incite Magazine


During undergrad I wrote a few essays for Incite Magaizne, typically about math. Here are a couple pieces I wrote:


An artistic rendering of the Seven Bridges of Königsberg, the inspiration for the mathematical field of graph theory

Old Blogs & Websites


My old undergrad & grad school blogs still have some good stuff on them but they’re also very silly. You can find them at straightfromthehood.wordpress.com (!!) and mattyj612.github.io.