“Wir müssen wissen — wir werden wissen.” — David Hilbert, Königsberg, 1930
A notebook for the ideas I want to understand properly, not just use.
What this is
The Hilbert Notebooks is a personal working journal — somewhere between a textbook chapter and a lab notebook. Each page picks one idea, takes it apart down to the mathematics that makes it work, then puts it back together in code.
Written for: Future me, who will inevitably forget all of this and need a clean reference.
If a page assumes prior knowledge, it says so up top. If a claim needs a proof, it gets one. No hand-waving.
About me
I’m Ashfak Hossain — a dumb with a stubborn belief that you don’t really understand an algorithm until you can re-derive it from scratch on a napkin.
I write here partly to teach, partly to learn, and partly to leave a paper trail I can follow back when I forget the details — which I always do.
Colophon
This site is built with Quartz (a fast static-site generator for digital gardens), authored in Obsidian, math rendered by KaTeX, syntax highlighting by Shiki, hosted on GitHub Pages. Source is open at github.com/Ashfak-Hossain/codex — fork it, copy from it, file issues, send corrections.
Typography: Proza Libre for headings, Bricolage Grotesque for body, IBM Plex Mono for code.
Get in touch
- Email — evan1234.ek@gmail.com
- GitHub — @Ashfak-Hossain
- Issues / corrections — open an issue on the repo
If you spot a mistake, a missing step in a proof, or a place where the prose is murky — please tell me. I would rather be corrected than be wrong in public.
The ideas don’t age.