Essays, notes, lists, and awards. On physics, learning systems, teaching, and the nature of identity.
ESSAY · 19 JUN 2026
I met the renormalization group in a stat-mech lecture at TUM, on a Tuesday, hungover, half-convinced I was in the wrong room. The professor drew a square lattice of spins on the board, then drew a coarser lattice on top of it, each new spin standing in for a block of the old ones. He averaged the block down to a
ESSAY · 15 JUN 2026
The first time I wrote a double-slit simulation, the interference pattern came out wrong. Not subtly wrong. The fringes were spaced like nothing in any textbook, and for an embarrassing afternoon I assumed the renderer was broken. It wasn't. I had fumbled a phase term, the kind of thing I would have nodded past on a
ESSAY · 29 JAN 2025
Most of machine learning learns a function from data and nothing else. A physics-informed neural network learns a function from data and from the differential equation that function is supposed to obey. You take the governing equation, move everything to one side so the true solution makes it zero, and add that
NOTES · 23 JUN 2026
The definition would not hold still. We were in a design review, the kind where someone writes a sentence on the whiteboard and the whole room argues about a single word for forty minutes. The sentence was supposed to say what it means to verify that someone is a unique living human. Every clause we added to pin down
LIST · 12 JUN 2026
A paper earns a place on this list by one test only: it changed how I think, not how impressed I was. Impressive is cheap. Half the famous results I admire didn't move a single belief; I read them, nodded, and went back to whatever I already thought. The ones below did damage. They left me unable to look at a learning
AWARD · 18 JUL 2025
Three years ago I moved to Germany without any German. In July 2025, a lecture hall full of physics students at TUM gave me a piece of golden chalk for teaching a tutorial in it. The award is the Goldene Kreide, and the student council gives it out once a year at Tag der Physik, off the back of the course-evaluation