The story so far

I attended secondary school at St. Augustine's Roman Catholic High School in Edinburgh. By some measures, it was, and remains, among the worst performing state schools in Scotland. I was, therefore, one of the first when, in the Autumn of 2014, I entered the University of Oxford's Medical School, which was at the time and by some calculi the best undergraduate health sciences programme in the world. I was affiliated to The Queen's College, the alma mater of the child prodigy and philosopher Jeremy Bentham, an 18th century utilitarian who campaigned against the death penalty, but also that of Timothy Berners-Lee, an electrical engineer, pioneer and early populariser of the world wide web (WWW). In recent years, he's spoken out against SOPA/PIPA, onerous net neutrality laws, and in general advocated that the protocol remain true to its original purpose of liberating people, enlightening them and bringing them together. It's also the alma mater of Rowan Atkinson, another electrical engineer and incredibly intelligent man most famous for playing Mr. Bean.

Unfortunately, though, medicine wasn't able to win my heart in quite the same way that mathematics once was. I saw former investment banker and Hertford College Principal Will Hutton interview Sir Mervyn King, the former British central bank governor, on the failures that led to the financial crisis of 2007-08. The quantitative nature of economics and the finance industry rejuvenated my interest in analytic methods.

My Bulgarian friend and mathematician at Queen's recommended to me the 'Effective Altruism' movement and 80,000 hours project. GiveWell's calculus for the most effective charities is truly inspirational. For my birthday in my last year at Oxford, my friends gave me the former World Bank chief Joseph Stiglitz' two books on Globalization and its Discontents, which made plain for me the massive global inequality and iniquity we face, and suggested for my attention the alter-mundialisation movement.

After graduating with the preclinical Bachelor's I decided to make the switch and applied to the University of Edinburgh for Mathematics. I was admitted to that course and entered first year in 2018 as a perhaps not-so-fresh Freshman once again; I studied Economics as well, and did well: I came in the top 2% of the year. Things were looking up.

We must then come to why I have begun this blog. It went live in August 2019. For the most part, I keep it as a private log of all the things I've looked at for fun (that is, outwith my formal maths studies), and as practice in visualising complex models and data in an easy-to-digest and colourful way. For those that decide to read it, I seek to educate using data. I seek to spark a debate. You are entitled - nay, encouraged - to debate with me and others here, using Graham's "hierarchy of disagreement" - mindful to avoid name-calling and ad hominem; substantial refutation is best. If you can change my mind on any point, we'll both consider it a success. I don't hold irrevocably to many positions.

The logo is a synthesis. On the inside is a portion of the Weierstrass monster, one of the most deviant functions in mathematics because of several properties - which was investigated by the autodidactic (self-educated) German school teacher Karl Weierstrass. It came as an affront or insult to the elite mathematicians of the day. Medium's Nautlius has a good article on the functions. The most important phrase is a quotation of French mathematician Henri Poincaré, who derided the work and coined the term 'monster': "They are invented on purpose to show our ancestors’ reasoning is at fault”. So this encapsulates the spirit of my work as in some regards revolutionary or unpalatable to authority. It gives us the word 'radical'. On the outside is a hollow enneagram usually attributed to the Bahá’í faith, a not well known (but widely disseminated globally) Iranian religion pioneered by Báb and Bahá'u'lláh. To adherents, the star encapsulates unity of religion. To me, in my remodelled context, I wish it to symbolise 'human unity'.

The synthesis overall, therefore, means radical human unity.

I hope you'll find something here that interests you! Or is at the very least pretty to look at.

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If you want to contact me ☎

michael.renfrew@aim.com