About

Hi! Welcome to my personal website. My name is Tony, and I am currently a Masters of Mathematics student at the University of New South Wales, focusing on statistics and machine learning. Previously, I was a student at the University of Sydney, graduating in 2020 with a Bachelor of Science (Advanced) (Honours in Pure Mathematics), where I wrote a thesis on finding solutions to a particular class of elliptic partial differential equations (PDE) with Associate Professor Florica Cirstea. After deciding to make the change to a more applied field (for a variety of reasons - I may write about this in future), I began looking for coursework masters degrees where I could explore my interests without a heavily constrained course structure, leading me to UNSW.

On this blog, I am hoping to share mathematical and statistical knowledge with blog posts explaining theory and applications. I have found that being forced to write up notes and theory as if I was explaining to an audience helps immensely in uncovering my own limited understanding of a particular topic. From a pedagogical standpoint, I believe these kinds of explanations are needed in the vast landscape of resources online and offline, to plug the gap between handwavey, intuitive explanations and dense, mathematical textbooks.

I will be aiming my writing at the undergraduate level, assuming basic calculus, linear algebra and probability theory knowledge. One complaint I often have when looking for resources is that it’s hard to find resources pitched at the level I need. The social and biological sciences, mathematical statistics and machine learning communities all use statistics, but the language, setting and use-cases differ, often dramatically. Coming from a pure mathematics background, I am (to an extent) comfortable with abstractions and interested in the theoretical underpinnings of statistics, yet resources which assume no statistical knowledge do not delve into such topics, and textbooks (Casella and Berger, Kallenberg come to mind) are often too dense to be appropriate for an independent self-study from the beginning. This is a very particular niche - after all, how many pure mathematics students transition to statistics per year without any pre-requisite knowledge of statistics, coding and the like? Hence, the purpose of this blog. I also just like to write things down more permanently as if people will read it in the future, so why not learn how to make a website and throw everything on there?

Anyhow, if you have somehow found your way to this site, thank you for reading!