Sports
I grew up playing soccer, and in the past I have played it more competitively.
Other hobbies
My other hobbies include West Coast Swing dancing, hiking, and reading Persian poetry.
Some Quotes
“Ars longa, vita brevis” -Latin translation of an aphorism coming from Greek
“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” -Hamlet
“That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn” -T-H-White, once and future king
“It’s by logic that we prove, and it’s by intuition that we discover” -Henri Poincare
“I can illustrate the … approach with the … image of a nut to be opened. The first analogy that came to my mind is of immersing the nut in some softening liquid, and why not simply water? From time to time you rub so the liquid penetrates better, and otherwise, you let time pass. The shell becomes more flexible through weeks and months — when the time is ripe, hand pressure is enough, the shell opens like a perfectly ripened avocado! A different image came to me a few weeks ago. The unknown thing to be known appeared to me as some stretch of earth or hard marl, resisting penetration … the sea advances insensibly in silence, nothing seems to happen, nothing moves, the water is so far off you hardly hear it … yet finally it surrounds the resistant substance.” -Alexander Grothendieck on simplicity and generality
“Insist on adhering to well-established physical laws (be conservative), but follow those laws into their extreme domains (be radical), where unexpected insights into nature might be found.” -John Wheeler, on Radical Conservatism, an approach to theoretical physics he pioneered
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper” –W. B. Yeats?