# Hobbies

Canonical page: https://gamemathemagics.com/#/hobbies

I enjoy anything difficult technically and complex, and things that let me make stuff, have fun with friends, and solve problems.

#### Escape rooms
One of my greatest passions is escape rooms. I’ve probably done like 30+ of them. My friend and I did 10 of them in one day and beat them all, that’s our record and it was a great memory, but I’m never satisfied, the next goal is 12. Someday I want to open an escape room company and design the rooms.

#### Video games
I immensely enjoy difficult video games, and I’m a huge fan of the Souls games and making them even more difficult and requiring perfection to beat the bosses. My favorite game of all time is Sekiro because of the way the combat works, where you have to know the boss and constantly fight it. There’s also multiplayer mods for Souls games and there’s nothing better than slamming my head against a brick wall with my friend on a super hard boss, getting better just because of skill acquired when fighting it, no stat changes or anything like that.

#### Crochet
A hobby I’ve recently become fascinated with is crochet. It’s incredible, I feel like I’m using a 3d-pen. I love making little animals. I’m terrible at it, but hey, practice makes perfect. It’s a very calming activity, and I’m enjoying getting better at it and challenging myself to make more complex projects.

A problem I’ve been thinking about, related to crochet, is how it interacts with knot theory and topology and graph theory. Parts of it are already solved. The existing work takes a 3d mesh and generates amigurumi patterns from it, cutting the shape into crochetable pieces you join as you go. But that is a geometric approach, and it works with a handful of basic stitches.

The angle I want to take is completeness. Build a compositional algebra of stitches with knot theory underneath it, work out what that algebra can actually express, and then break an object down into those blocks rather than fitting a surface. Colour switching too. I am reading up on the math I would need, but for now I am content making cute little sea animals.

#### Hobbyist mathematician
I really enjoyed my time at OU taking as many math courses as possible, was entirely immersed in mathematics, I lived and breathed proofs and elegancy of simplicity and just fell in love with it. While academia itself, and teaching, is not for me, I do love sitting down one on one with someone and working a problem through with them, which is a different thing entirely. I’m never going to stop being a mathematician and I’m super excited about my upcoming paper currently a pre-print, which you can see under my Papers tab, and more to come, and I’m definitely going to work on that crochet inverse problem.