Inspirations for tobylam.xyz
It has been two years since my first post and I’d like to share some of my thoughts on what made this blog a reality, and my thoughts on the direction of this blog. After all, the inspirations for this website heavily affect the direction I would like to take it.
Inspirations
My biggest inspiration would be the blog 竟然成為數學家 by Masy Leung, a mathematics professor at HKUST. When I first found out about his blog, I was pleasantly surprised as I’d never seen a blog about mathematics written in Chinese before. It comforted me that blogging is not something exclusive to western mathematicians.
With regard to the content, I really enjoy how conversational/personal the writing is. It reminds me that a mathematician’s life is much more than just mathematics. For example, I liked this blog post which affirmed a lot of my thoughts about university education in general and gave me the confidence to continue doing what I want to do at Oxford.
I also really liked him sharing his experiences as an undergraduate / graduate student as it made me realise that someone like me has been through all of this before and that I’m not alone.
Without his blog and many others, I probably would’ve never had the motivation to start my own / continue to sustain it til this day.
Friends
A lot of my friends also have websites of their own. It shows me that there’s a genuine appetite for websites as means of self-expression which encourages me to take my blog further.