Sarath Tharayil

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How a bored Cambridge mathematician invented a game with four absurdly simple rules, accidentally broke the idea of complexity, and spent the rest of his life regretting it.

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Why two perfectly rational people always make the worst possible choice together, and what that reveals about climate, war, and human cooperation.

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In 1924, two mathematicians proved you can decompose a solid ball into five pieces and reassemble them into two balls of equal size. No stretching. No scaling. Completely rigorous mathematics. Here is how, and why it works.

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Someone picks a card from nine, buries it in the deck, and you deal four chaotic piles counting backwards from ten. The sum of what lands face-up tells you exactly where the card is. Every single time. Here is why the deck has no choice.

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In 1742, Goldbach wrote Euler a letter with an observation so simple a child could understand it. No one has proven it since. Here is the 280-year story of the conjecture, the man who came closest in a boiler room under a kerosene lamp, and what it costs to chase an unprovable truth.

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Google used to ask job candidates what they'd do if shrunk to the size of a coin and dropped in a blender. The math says jump out. The physics says you're dead either way. Both answers are wrong for interesting reasons.

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A Russian mathematician picked a fight with God in 1906 and accidentally built the mathematical engine behind Google, ChatGPT, nuclear weapons, and card shuffling. The story of Markov chains and the strange power of forgetting.

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In 1968, a scientist built a perfect world for mice: unlimited food, no predators, no disease. The colony was extinct in five years. What Universe 25 reveals about density, identity, and what happens when survival becomes too easy.

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How political propaganda, algorithmic manipulation, and neurobiology combine to hijack belief, and what it actually takes to break free.

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A step-by-step interactive guide to 1NF, 2NF, 3NF, BCNF, 4NF, and 5NF with real SQL and transforming tables at every stage.

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How India quietly became the source of 40% of America's generic drugs, 60% of the world's vaccines, and one of the most important forces in global healthcare. A fifty-year story of bold laws, brilliant scientists, and one audacious phone call.

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A deep look at the real neuroscience and psychology behind why ambitious people consistently fail to act on their own ambitions. Hint: it is not laziness.

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The smart television sitting in your living room is a continuous surveillance device. This is how it works, which brands do it, what they earn from it, and how to make it stop.

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In 1995, a bureaucrat assigned the internet suffix .ai to a tiny Caribbean island. Nobody cared. Then ChatGPT launched. Now Anguilla is abolishing taxes.

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The Wi-Fi router sitting in your living room can, with the right software, detect your presence, track your movements, estimate your body pose, and identify who you are. No camera, no sensors on your body, and it works through solid walls. Here is exactly how that works, and what you can do about it.

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There is a river in the footer of this website. Literally. Here is what it is, where it comes from, and why I put it there.

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Modern life is full of things that feel broken but are not, things that feel designed well but were not, and things that were designed for something else entirely and just never left. A philosophical walk through why the world is like this.

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Kerala's 2026 power crisis starts nine years ago with four contracts, a procedural shortcut, and a regulatory body that decided rules matter more than electricity. Here's how the state lost 465 MW of cheap baseload power and then spent two years failing to get it back.

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Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Perplexity all feel meaningfully different to use, and that is not random. Their architectures, training data, and system-level design push them toward genuinely different strengths. Here is what is actually going on under the hood.

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Gerald Durrell's love letter to Lee McGeorge, July 31st 1978. I first heard it read by Tom Hiddleston in LettersLive and have not stopped thinking about it since.