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I am sure you have seen Venn diagrams before. Venn diagrams are amazing — they can represent complex relationships between sets in a rather intuitive way. And it does not matter what these sets represent. If you are working with sets, you will often find Venn diagrams to be a natural way to present your data. But it so happens that this is gener...

Academic integrity to university students1 is what the constitutional pledge is to elected politicians. We acknowledge it as a pious commitment to our identity in our institutions, but this acknowledgment is often riddled with dilemmas and contradictions. Transgressions are either justified by circumstances or dismissed as trivial, and while we ...

Not long ago, I realized I have been holding onto a tiny time machine. I realized this when I once accidentally turned it on! I do not have the user manual for this time machine, but from several instances of such accidental time travel, I now have some idea of how it works. This time machine is quite primitive — in the way that it does not all...

Two years ago on this day, I reported at the campus of the Indian Institute of Science — to begin my undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Computing. With this, I have completed somewhat half of my IISc time1. There’s a lot to say about these two years, including the things I have learnt and the people I have met. But I will save my time2 by s...

Deadlines have some sort of magic to them. A project can continue to drag on for months, but as soon as we decide to make a deadline1, usually one of two things happen. The entire universe conspires to make sure we meet the deadline with everything we want to do. We conspire to make sure we meet the deadline with everything we can (and sho...

I am always very excited about meeting students from other universities, especially undergrad students. And whenever I do meet students from other universities, I am most interested in listening about how things work at their school. The undergrad program at IISc is very new. If you talk about the B.Tech. program in particular, that is as new a...

I have lately been working with GraalVM to use Polyglot for embedding Python code in Java. In doing so I sometimes require a translation of Java objects to Python objects and vice versa, while passing them between the two languages. My research advisor recently pointed out that my translation will fall apart if he passed a self-referential objec...

Python is a very flexible language, and provides a lot of “magic” for developers to do nearly anything they want with the language and also the objects in the language. One interesting feature is the ability to override the so-called “dunder” methods (methods with double underscores on either side) on classes in order to provide custom behaviour...