What's "whatsacomputertho", Tho?
Published: 2021-01-25 02:39:57

####My Brand Identity
Hello everyone, and welcome to whatsacomputertho.  It is my mission with this brand to provide learners with nearly any level of skill in math and programming with relatively informal content which leaves them both amazed, and feeling as though they learned something new.  Ultimately, I hope my mission will help lead toward my goal of mapping the landscape of mathematics, computer science, and their various overlapping fields for both experienced and inexperienced learners to become aware of each of their subfields and the relationships between them.

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##Background

####My Personal Journey
Part of what inspired whatsacomputertho is my personal background with mathematics and computer science.  Throughout high school, I was unaware of the fact that computer science was such a rich field, both intellectually and professionally.  This is due to the fact that my high school simply did not offer computer science courses.  In addition, while I was quite the fan of math in high school, all in all, my high school’s math department was highly focused and did not do a great job overall of exposing us to the wide range of mathematical fields.

Due to this, I chose to pursue my hobby of videography and video editing as a major in college.  I pursued this hobby pretty heavily for quite a while before stumbling across a few YouTube videos discussing higher-dimensional geometry and non-euclidean projection which revitalized my interest in, and appreciation for, mathematics.  Furthermore, this really inspired my goal to build a mental map of mathematics, and eventually pursue a more technical major in college.

####Development of “whatsacomputertho”
During the summer after my Freshman year at college, after I had switched my major to a more technical area of study, I decided I would spend the summer “catching up” to my peers who had more experience programming than I had at that time.  I studied very basic web development, and in doing so, I realized how little I knew about the realm of computer abstraction.  I found it incredibly hard to understand just how everything worked at various levels of abstraction, and so, just as I had begun to do for mathematics, I began constructing a second mental map of the field of computer science.  This was what had led to my realization of my guiding question, the question which inspires me each day to push a bit further in my studies.  My guiding question is, “What’s a computer though?”.


##My Brand in Practice

####The Monty Hall Problem
While I could discuss for hours the cheesy corporate gibberish of mission statements and goal declarations, I would rather put on display a tangible example of what my brand truly contributes to today’s digital landscape.  Below, you will find my most recent video discussing the infamous Monty Hall problem.  I find this particular problem to be one which can trick even the most experienced statistician or analyst, yet one which is simultaneously so easy to understand upon analysis, that even those with little to no experience can understand just what makes it so unintuitive.  In order to do so, I modeled the problem using a decision tree, which I felt did the job of turning an unintuitive problem into an intuitive one.

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