Things that talk to me.
A home page for Hew Wolff.
What's new.Release 2024-01-23: - Spacing is wrong around "Berkeley couples".- Update résumé goals.- Update Things I'm Playing With.- Add end/coend and real analysis results.- Tilings paper link is broken.- Top right image and both top links are broken.- "Git skeptic" link is broken.- "Good code" link is broken.- Update hot list.Release 2023-06-18: - Update résumé for Lively and goals.How to reach me. You can find me at .
Things I've done.
| Here's | my résumé. |
| I like working in multiple media, especially | poems |
| and | pictures (want one?). |
| Random obsessions include | cardboard boxes, |
| ghost signs, | |
| and | the most expensive thing I've ever bought. |
| Mathematically speaking, there's | an investigation into category algebras, |
| a surprisingly tricky example from category theory, | |
| some old-style | real analysis, |
| a paper on tilings, | |
| a solution to a problem from Google, | |
| an investigation into discrete knots, | |
| and | a solitaire game. |
| Just for fun, here's | a humorous maze puzzle, |
| another maze game, | |
| and | a puzzle about movie ratings. |
| Moving toward software, there are some articles | critiquing test-driven development, |
| proposing an unusual JavaScript style, | |
| complaining about version control, | |
| applying XSLT to indentation, | |
| and | describing localization on autopilot. |
Things I've done that you might want to hide from your kids. For stuff that's more raunchy or otherwise sensitive, see my complete poems, and a short story in an anthology of some friendly local perverts.
People I know. Check out my very cool partner (read her stuff and tell her I sent you), and my illustrious forebear. Here are some of my favorite people to hang out with in a café or a video call, a fine actor, and some weird musicians.
People I'd like to know. Here's a crypto guy and writer. Probably not far from me is an applied topologist and writer whose Web design skills are a lot like mine. Now in the dust are a fantasist of things weird and true, never to be confused with J.K. Rowling; a mathematician and kindred spirit who died in 1954; a master of creepy stories; and the Russian bard. It would be cool to meet the people who made my favorite movies. And if I had to pick a stranger to sleep with, I'd go for some selected artists.
Things I'm playing with. For personal projects especially, I like a language that may be commercial someday, a language that's big in Japan, an appreciation of immutable data, a magical cheap glue, and a satisfying knot for tight packaging.
Things I've found (that aren't in Google yet).
At the Coptic monastery of St. Jeremias in Saqqara, Egypt, perhaps just before it was abandoned late in the sixth century A.D., a man enciphered a message in monalphabetic substitution and scratched it on the wall inside the door to a courtyard in a curious bid for immortality. “In the name of God before all things,” the inscription calls out beseechingly across the centuries, “I, Victor, the humble poor man—remember me.”
The Codebreakers, David Kahn (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967), p. 86
“Looking is giving a direction to one's sight,” observed Leonardo da Vinci. “A bird is an instrument...it opens its wings quickly and sharply, bending in such a way that the wind...raises it. And this I have observed in the flight of a young falcon above the monastery at Vaprio, to the left of the Bergamo road, on the morning of 14 April 1500.”
The Art of Looking Sideways, Alan Fletcher (Phaidon Press, 2001), p. 179
If all the matter in the Universe were made transparent, all except for the roundworms, we would still be able to discern our planet's face, the landscape, the trees and plants, and the animals, from the ghostly fog of their burden of roundworms.
Deep Time, Henry Gee (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 106
If the world were well rid of every Czar, then the most greedy, the most cruel, and the least truthful of those left would call themselves Czars — and the rest would let them do it.
But we need not love Czars, and we need not become them.
The Ghost Drum, Susan Price (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987), p. 160
Wilsonia had about thirty people, most of them relatives. It was too small to have a zip code, and the main industry was jury duty. My grandfather named the streets, and my dad paved them. Everything was compulsory, or else it was forbidden.
What I Love about Lesbian Politics Is Arguing with People I Agree With, Kris Kovick (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1991), p. 90