Crazy Wisdom
Kunal (@crazypolymath)
- first principles thinking
- calculus
- history of mathematics
- globalization
- learning philosophy
- cross-cultural dialogue
About this episode
I really enjoyed sitting down with Kuval who lives in India and is spitting fire on Twitter about how to make money doing what you love. We get into that as well as first principles, and the transmission of morals in the time of globalization.
Episode transcript
So basically what I do is I directly go to the history when that concept was born. For example, for example, if we take calculus in school, we had calculus and my teachers assayed me that d by dx of x squared is equal to 2x. I said, okay, where did that come from? And he wasn't able to explain it. And so I digged deeper. Not in school, unfortunately. I failed a lot of times mathematics in my school and in college asked question that where did derivative came from? And then I saw that, okay, Newton invented calculus. Then I thought about, okay, why Newton invented calculus, what was the problem he was stuck in, which calculus solved for him. And then I dug deeper and saw that, okay, the linear equations were getting complicated for him. And to solve that problem, he created the solution that is calculated calculus.
I grew up reading about the rest of the world, looking at maps, plain civilization. And I really fell in love with the stimulation that comes from learning about a culture that's completely different than yours, but also has gone through the last 200 years of globalization and has started to adopt other practices from other cultures and to get this synchronization or synthesization from many different cultures altogether. And so when I interviewed Kuval, he was sitting in Gujarat at 8:30pm and I was sitting in San Francisco at 8am and we were having a conversation about first principles, about Newton, about India. And it just kind of came together that this is exactly what I love doing, figuring out what is globalization? What is this thing that we've entered upon over the past 150 years? A lot of people think it's bad, a lot of people think it's good. But what is it beyond the labels, what is globalization and what is the result? Where are we going? And I really like how this interview brings that out. Not to mention that Kuval is incredibly intelligent, and not only intelligent, but able to break things down and make them
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