About c0c0n3

c0c0n3 stands for co-cone which is what I call whatever looks like an upside down cone after snorting an epic amount of maths.

As if snorting maths wasn't bad enough, I also have binge programming disorder. I desperately needed a username to remind me constantly of how badly maths and programming can mess up your brain, hoping one day I'd give up my addictions. What better than silly-sounding maths jargon then? "Cocone", honestly, say it loud! (Not in public though...) Also, why not go the whole hog and make it look like source code? For that, just replace vowels with numbers and—voilà!—you have c0c0n3.

Oh, the use of a Leet-looking username is totally accidental, surely not meant as a proclamation of a high level of skill.

What are you likely to find here? Lots of maths and (mostly functional) programming as well as ways to use the maths hammer & chisel to craft beautiful programs. (Follow the links to see the sort of stuff I like and find beautiful; the plan is to start blogging about some of that stuff…) Did I mention I've got an addiction problem?

About the Logo

So I had a username but no avatar to use for profile pictures. The horror! Fortunately after snorting a couple of decent sized lines of category theory, I had an idea: turn a diagram with a cocone into an avatar! Navigate through the slides below if you want to see what was buzzing in my skull...

Commutative diagram of category Q with 6 arrows; 3 non-identity arrows and 3 identities: i, j, k. (Using "arrows-only" definition of category.)

Endo-functor F on Q maps arrows as noted on right and as suggested by colours, giving smiley diagram in Q. (Dots stand for identities.)

Natural transformation ζ from F to constant functor with fixed identity k; its components are: c₀ , c₀ , n₃ … a cocone of the smiley diagram!

go to slide: 1• 2• 3•

In words, the basic idea was to get a cocone ζ of a diagram F that I could deform into a smiley and to have ζ's components add up to a sequence of symbols (c₀ c₀ n₃) that would be a sort of stylish rendering of c0c0n3. (Yup, on top of my addictions I also have bad taste!) Once I had that, I deformed the whole thing into the shapes you see in my profile picture and then just added a touch of colour. See? There's a method to my madness!