Junior Manu Gupta recently created a blog, “Byte of Math,” as a hub to explore math and computer science concepts. With posts titled “The Math Behind Support Vector Machines” and “Lagrangian Polynomials,” the blog presents computer science and mathematical concepts in concise coherent steps. Manu also provides extra resources at the bottom of the page for readers to follow up on the content.
In his spare time, Manu enjoys taking on random projects to improve his coding skills and tries to make his innovative contributions by revisiting old math ideas. He’s filled countless math journals, which soon became “unmanageable.”
As a result, he used his interest in math to organize his ideas and provide a platform for the math of computer science to be thoroughly explored.
“It’s a good initiative because when you look at many of the online resources out there on coding topics, they sort of jump over the math simply because it may be too hard, and leave people like me with an incomplete and overly simplified understanding of a topic,” he explained.
The structured yet abstract nature of math is what Manu finds its greatest appeal. “Seeing connections between things is always surprising and to me, the sense of discovery is amazing.” After taking AP Computer Science A, he discovered a similarity between math and computer science “in that coding is a very flexible system that can be used to solve tons of problems.”
“I’m just showing how we can’t take things for granted either when there could be simpler forms or intuition in another form of something,” Manu wrote in the post summary for “A Simpler and More Elegant Quadratic Formula.” “It’s more about the idea of being creative that’s important than simply thinking math is a long list of rules. It’s not! We do math for fun and to explore, not to regurgitate information in non-intuitive ways.”
Manu considers finding math and coding intimidating to be a result of associating them with “a set of rules and equations as opposed to ideas just being represented as symbols.” He explained, “I never really considered these fields to be one as a set of rules that must be followed, but more of a creative field where people can use intuitive ideas and build on those ideas until some amazing conclusions can follow. Just be curious and question everything to its very fundamentals.”
Here is the link to Byte of Math: https://www.byteofmath.com/
