Apparently even people on Quora want to know why I transferred from Harvard to MIT. Since I’ve been asked this question way too many times, I guess I should give an answer, once and for all.

There were plenty of reasons (and anti-reasons). I should say some anti-reasons first to give due credit – the Harvard math department is fantastic, and Harvard gives you significantly more freedom than MIT to take whatever you want. These were the main reasons why transferring was a difficult decision, and in fact I’m only ~70% sure I might the right choice.

Ultimately, the main reason I transferred was due to the housing.

At MIT, you basically get to choose where you live. All the dorms, and even floors within dorms, are different: living on 3rd West versus living on 5th East might as well be going to different colleges. Even if for some …

So I guess I can resume blogging now, seeing that I’m done with college applications (at last!). I’m not sure what I plan to blog about in general, but I figured I might as well put this domain name to good use :) I also realized that writing things out helped me clarify my thinking a lot (actually Qiaochu Yuan recommended this for math in particular), so I’ll be trying to do that more often this $2014 = 2 \cdot 19 \cdot 53$ and onwards.

Onto the actual content, anyways. In this post I’ll talk about the inspiration and development for one of my afternoon projects, which I’ve named wintermelon for no good reason.

A while back Jacob Steinhardt recommended to the SPARC alumni list that we check our email at most twice a day. I was able to …