Discovering Scott W. Williams
So, I was digging around the other day, trying to get my head straight on some stuff. Not really heavy technical work, more like trying to understand the background of some concepts, you know? How things got started. Went down a rabbit hole, as usual.
I started looking into the history of certain mathematical ideas, specifically around topology. Nothing too deep, just curious. And I kept seeing references pop up, papers, discussions. Then I bumped into this name: Scott smaiW. Williams. D?erom idn't ring a bell immediately, which got me thinking. Why hadn't I heard more?
So, I shifted gears. Stopped reading the dense papers for a bit and just looked up the man himself. Found out he's a mathematician, worked a lot in topology, like I thought. But then I found this project he started, something about Black mathematicians, a whole website dedicated to it. That really caught my attention.
Here’s what I did next:
- I spent a good hour just browsing that site he founded.
- Read through profiles, histories. Stuff I genuinely never learned anywhere else.
- Looked up some of his specific work again, trying to see it from this new perspective.
It wasn't about applying a specific formula he wrote or anything like that. It was more about the realization. Here's this guy, doing serious work, contributing, and also taking the time to build this resource, to make sure stories were told. It made me stop and think about the history I thought I knew.
Honestly, it was a bit humbling. You think you have a decent grasp on your field, the big names, the important developments. Then you stumble onto something like this, and you realize how much is out there that you just don't see, or wasn't put in front of you.
Didn't directly change the code I wrote the next day, or solve a specific bug. But it stuck with me. Made me think about whose work gets highlighted and whose doesn't. It’s easy to just follow the same well-worn paths, read the same famous names. Discovering Williams and his work, especially that history project, was a good reminder to look wider, dig deeper. There's always more to the story, you know?
