TODO.txt

**Reviewed 2022-03-17**

## Large Efforts

* Physics:
  * I think I want to learn all intro physics.
  * Especially electronics and electromagnetism.
  * The Feynman lectures have been a great guide!
  * Endothermic/exothermic reactions.
  * Want to understand why some materials are transparent.
* Signal Processing and Encoding
  * I want to properly understand AM vs FM transmission.
  * Parity bits and encoding schemes
  * Wavelet transform
    * I understand the Fourier transform so let's take it one more step!
    * Also: Laplace transform?
    * Also: can I speed up/slow down music without changing the pitch?
* Cryptography
  * Zero knowledge proof. Interactive proofs? Zcash?
    * Is there a book that covers this?
    * Also I'd like to understand homomorphic encryption!
  * More minor: Elliptic Curve Crypto and Lattice Based Crypto
* Statistics
  * Prove Central Limit Theorem?
  * Improve/extend understanding of symmetric matrices.
  * Write up/improve understanding of eigenvector decomposition, SVD.
  * I feel like I never really finish this.
* Decentralized Systems, Multi-Party Coordination, and Economics
  * Voting systems.
  * Incentive alignment.

## Minor Efforts

* Deep Learning
  * Might be nice to get Deep Q Network to actually work...
  * Alpha Go.
  * Neural Turing Machine, Monte-Carlo Tree Search.
  * Attention.
  * GPT-2 type stuff?
  * That cooperation paper.
  * But overall I don't know that I really care about this kind of
    stuff.
* Pure mathematics
  * Quintic unsolvability
    * JRN re-interested me in this.
* Random
  * Return to notes on Prisoner's Dilemma from computability standpoint?
    * In particular: understand Freeman Dyson paper.
  * Writeup how reverse image search works. Text search/info retrieval.
    * Com'on this should be easy!
  * Ordinary Differential Equations
    * This came up in Feynman when we studied springs.
    * I think at least for some simple ones it wouldn't be so hard?
  * React Hook Notes
  * TSP algorithms?
  * Voting systems. Condorcet methods.
  * Chaos theory

## Past Interests

- Concurrency/Parallelization
  - I was interested in coordination and also parallel algorithms. But I
    don't know that I am that interested in these now?
- Data Structures/algorithms
  - I don't want to know more about data structures at present.
  - I might be curious about randomized algorithms/computability
    per Aaronson. But I'm not that curious about it.
- Databases: I feel like I have nowhere further to go with this.
  - There aren't any problems I really want to solve with databases.
- Data Intensive Applications et cetera
  - Anything big data is not that interesting to me going forward.
- Logic/Set Theory
  - I don't know how further logic knowledge would help me.
- Programming Languages
  - I'm not that interested in either compilers or learning more ideas
    in PL theory.
- Quantum
  - I don't know what I would want to learn next about this.

## Explanation

I think I've satiated my interest in algorithms, databases, distributed
systems. Those were fun mental games/playgrounds, but I don't feel
motivated to go deeper into the minutia of them. There are a few tiny
exceptions (reverse image search, building a compiler).

I seem to be more focused on physical science (physics, electronics,
even chemistry!). I think this relates to wanting to learn how to
control/manipulate "meatspace." This is also taking me into some applied
math.

I can still be interested from time-to-time in crypto stuff. It
definitely feels "magical" that we can do certain things. And it does
feel powerful and fit in with some of my anti-corporatist sentiment.

I can always keep half an eye on ML to see if anything interesting or
exciting comes up. Since I'm not focused on ends, my interest depends
primarily on whether there are fundamentally new and interesting
techniques.

Pure mathematics doesn't much motivate me. But for reasons of personal
history, I would enjoy revisiting quintic unsolvability!

## Typesetting

I want to try to writeup a lot of old math notes in Latex. Here I list
some documents to start with. Note: I may already *understand* these,
but I may still want to present them more clearly and accessibly for
others.

* Linear Algebra:
  * Typeset SVD notes.
  * Cleanup/consolidate various remaining eigenvector decomposition
    notes.
  * Typeset Strang notes (eventually).
* Optimization:
  * Typeset notes on Lagrange constrained optimization.
  * Typeset notes on Newton's method.
* Typeset notes on quantum computing (Simon's and Grover's algos).