Who I am

I am Jay. I live in Cambridge, near Boston. My work seems to flow seasonally between two areas: being and math.

I'm an insatiable learner. Things I've nerded out about include cooking, knitting, collecting maps, hiking, off-road driving, puzzling, bass guitar, and child-raising. And there's the stuff taught in schools, too.

My life has been pretty eclectic; I've been many different people already. I grew up in New Orleans, and lived awhile in the SF Bay Area. There was also a nomadic stint in which I experienced most of the country. I've seen the insides of aristocracies, meritocracies, and countercultures. I've gotten myself bent into a huge variety of psychological malfunctions, ideologies, and relational sways.

Nowadays I have a very different orientation: investing in the practice of life, rather than collecting experiences. Appreciating what this life already is, rather than seeking anywhere other than here to find anything or anyone other than this. Opening up to sticking with it, sticking with opening up to it.

All of which is to say, who I am is something always to be discovered, not an identity that can be known.

What I do: being

Being, in the sense of this human experience: being oneself, being in this world. It is rather odd how, compared with all living things, we have such a complicated relationship with the bodies and minds that we come with. And any particular guidance amounts to a religion, a topic our particular society has an acrimonious relationship with.

I hold a basic stance that every mindset has a baby in the bathwater. In choosing what to believe, what matters is often not what is true—indeed the belief might not be honestly verifiable nor falsifiable—but rather how it would influence us and thereby serve us if were were to believe it. The question of what's useful when is the essence of judgment.

The subtle practice is having one foot fully in it and one foot fully out. On the one hand, entering a world view openly, unknowingly, curiously, compassionately; letting it tell you what it is, rather than grasping at it with your previous concepts. On the other hand, remembering the way back to center; bearing in mind that for all its satisfying explanatory power, this view, too, has its blind spots.

Granted this, my approach has been to map out widely. The recognizable modes of psychiatry, therapy, coaching, meditation, and psychedelics, in their myriad subvarieties, have all been in the mix in some major way. But more honestly, the entire flow of one's experience, including everyone you meet and this very mind, is the grist.

I served as a personal coach for about five years. This period has concluded for now, and I am not taking clients.

My current season of work is more private, focused on my own practice, walking a road I do not know. The beacon I track on the horizon is to better share the art of choosing perspectives, in service of better suiting our circumstances and thereby making peace.

What I do: math

Math, in the sense of bringing to bear certain habits of mind or modes of thinking. These include shifting between the abstract and concrete, looking out for the pattern versus the instance, knowing when to be rigorous or vague, and keeping track of what is even possible to be true or for us to know in the situation. They are the unspoken substrate of the stereotypical bag of computational tricks.

In my relative youth, my mathematical work was in number theory, with a strong influence from contemporary algebraic geometry. A little more specifically, I was concerned with p-adic things like Iwasawa theory, p-adic Hodge theory, and eigenvarieties.

For a stint, I was employed doing computational geometry for a manufacturing startup.

My current math work is in probabilistic computation. I am trying to distill, and then articulate, what is going on in a first-principles manner.

Anything else?

The blog and older writings pages give more of a sense of who I have been at some times. You can subscribe to occasional email updates from me, including new offerings, writings, and availabilities.

Although I'm not taking any new work right now, I'm happy to nerd out with people and compare notes. Feel free to reach out at this email.