The collection of knowledge is special since it can never be fully completed. The more you learn the more you realize the little you have collected. Nevertheless, this is no reason to stop collecting, or any reason to think one cannot contribute something meaningful along the way.
Hi, I’m Emmanuel Gil Torres and want to extend you a warm welcome to my website. I am going into my second year as a math PhD student at Purdue University that is beginning to explore the areas of optimal transport. However, the aim of this blog is much bigger than science. It is centered around three words that I believe to accurately describe me and my aspirations: a collector, a student, and a teacher.
The collector is the persona that drives the two descriptions that succeed it. Rather than focusing on one specific topic, I will attempt to collect information about some of my biggest passions. The topics will be organized in two general areas — Art, and Mathematics. Is the ultimate collection of knowledge possible? Of course not. Will I have the best available collection of knowledge? Most certainly not. However, the aim will be to whet the appetite of the reader on a wide range of topics of interest to me, and perhaps inspire you to start pursuing and finding your own passions. The reason for the wide range of topics is because I believe that the world is more connected than we think, and sometimes we tend to separate things into boxes. For example, I draw inspiration from relatively simple things such as when science and art met in the naming of the quark, a fundamental constituent of matter, after a phrase in James Joyce’s classical book Ulysses.
This then leads to the second description, the student. As a PhD student, my current aim is to specialize in “learning how to learn”, rather than constricting it to one specific area. I love to learn, and this blog will be a way that pushes myself to learn novel things frequently in search for new content to write about. At this point, I am certainly no master at any of the things I will be writing about. But one thing I wish to accomplish in the long term is to show an evolution of thought. How I think and try to learn things now, and how it ends up in 5-10 years, when hopefully I have mastered a few. I think this is novel, because in my experience, most people write only after they are successful, not while they are learning. I hope to provide novel and honest insight on the learning process from that perspective.
Lastly, the teacher. At this point, this is more of an ambition rather than current state. So far, I have noticed that one common thing that I tend to enjoy no matter what I am doing is to teach. When I was playing soccer competitively, I loved to show my friends how to do certain moves, when I began weightlifting I liked to tell my friends of the science behind lifting, and as a student I loved teaching my friends concepts I had already understood or looked into. Hence, one last goal is to teach from my personal experiences.