Hi, this is Conan.

I started blogging here in 2009, when I was twenty and deeply immersed in the world of mathematics. I saw everything in pictures, and this became a place to try to translate those pictures into words: dynamical systems, metric geometry, low-dimensional topology, and occasional side quests into analysis and groups.

Since 2013 I have wandered through several other worlds. Finished PhD at Princeton, left mathematics, studied classical painting in Los Angeles, worked on the Pirates of Caribbean ride in Shanghai Disneyland, became a management consultant at McKinsey, learned programming in Silicon Valley, did software engineering at Google, tried to build an architecture/construction startup, and eventually ended up restoring a distressed 1892 brick house in St. Louis into a home and art studio.

I spent a lot of time traveling the world: monasteries, dive boats, ski towns, festivals, old cities, strange hotels, and long gaps between more legible chapters. I see it as a way to reset, gather texture, and let different environments rearrange my sense of what life can be.

Recently I’ve been working on Psy_, a personal AI system for long-term memory, reflection, and metacognition. It grew out of my own use of AI as a kind of external thinking infrastructure — a way to hold continuity across scattered moods, decisions, memories, and unfinished selves, and to gradually synthesize one’s internal structure, motivation, taste, and identity over time. The project involves combining a few things from current AI systems, algorithms, graph theory, and the strange geometry of high-dimensional embedding spaces.