Oisín Davey

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Hiya!

My name is Oisín (with a fada); I’m studying to become a physicist/mathematician/something or other at Maynooth University, Ireland. At time of writing, I’ve just recently returned from working at CERN in Geneva and have entered my final year of undergrad.

Listening

It follows from stereotypes about physics students that, because I don’t rock climb, I must be into music. Despite my best efforts, I never could summon the discipline to properly perform, but I do still play piano & guitar for personal enjoyment.

Artists:

Reading

The TBR pile currently streches back to 2019, largely due to a book-buying spree in 2021 from which I have yet to recover financially or otherwise. On the chopping block right now are: Asimov’s «Foundation», «Gödel, Escher, Bach», «Glory» by NoViolet Bulawayo, «Klara and the sun», «Something wicked this way comes», and «After dark».

I’m not sure if reading textbooks counts, or at least whether it’s right to talk about that in this section. Regardless the library have, in a masterful gambit of which even Ceaser would be jealous, begun construction in the maths & science section at the beginning of term time (ingenious) and as such I don’t even have access to textbooks.

Puzzles & Problem Solving

Big fan of puzzles (the professor layton kind, as opposed to the americanism meaning jigsaws). I feel like it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that I’m tailoring my career path towards solving puzzles for money. Of course there are many kinds of puzzles, and I certainly don’t have a thesis on what constitutes a puzzle, but here I’ll try to distinguish them from games. So, for example, chess definitely isn’t a puzzle, whereas suduko is.

I’d say there are two main types of puzzle: Puzzles of the first kind have undefined pre-requisites, and puzzles of the second kind have defined pre-requisites. By this I mean that there are some puzzles which you couldn’t solve (and know that you have solved it) even with infinite time. Take, for example, a crossword; It is pre-requisite to solving a crossword that you know all of the words in the solution.

However, this pre-requisite cannot be defined to the player without immediately spoiling the solution. On the other hand, when solving a sudoku, you can be given all of the rules and, given infinite time, you could always solve it (and know that you have done so). This distinction is designed to hopefully codify the intuitive separation between word puzzles and number puzzles.

Ofttimes, puzzles of the first kind come with ambiguity, such that, in order to solve them, the player must understand the cultural context surrounding the puzzle. You should be thinking in completely different ways when you’re solving a Guardian crossword as opposed to when solving a NYT crossword. It’s this facet of these puzzles which invites derision from those with few friends and from those who refuse to keep up with the world around them. Your “IQ” can be as high as you like, but if you don’t know who Chappell Roan is, you’re not going to be solving any crosswords in 10 years.

The joy in puzzles of the second kind, for me, is in taking the rules and deriving, therefrom, a set of implicit rules which offer a different perspective on the puzzle at hand. Take, for example, the fences puzzle. In fences, you are given the set of lattice points of a square grid, where you can draw vertical and horizontal lines between points, with the goal of forming one loop through all of the points. The solution, as in any puzzle, is uniquely determined. One of the rules states that the loop cannot self intersect, which implicitly means that the resulting curve forms the perimeter of a simple polygon in the plane. With this in mind, you can now have a coherent notion of a space being «inside» or «outside» the polygon, and rephrase the puzzle in this way.

There is an unending list of puzzles. Even within the rather specific category of latin square puzzles (to which sudoku belongs), you can find at least 5 different named puzzles.

More broadly than puzzles of the second kind, I really enjoy problem solving. I don’t use this term lightly in the way you might find in the CV of a business student. I mean analytical problem solving, the kind which shows up in mathematical physics, phenomenology, competition programming, etc. This really involves the identification of hidden patterns which, when found, reveal a new perspective by which to view the problem at hand.

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