I've always been fascinated by mathematics. I was never exactly at the top of my class. Not a math prodigy in school or university, but something about the elegance of math and how it underpins the very fabric of nature has always blown my mind.
Sure, when most people hear "math," they think of calculus, integrals, or Fourier transforms, topics that were often despised and quickly forgotten after finals. We rarely use them directly in day-to-day life, or so it seems. But if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that math quietly powers almost everything around us.
Take Shazam, for instance. The app that magically tells you what song is playing in a noisy cafe. It relies on the Fourier transform to break sound into its frequency components. Or consider ChatGPT. At its core, it runs on complex neural networks and transformers, which are essentially large-scale matrix operations, a pure expression of mathematical beauty.
The deeper you dive into math and computer science, the more you start seeing everything as a system to be modeled, optimized, or hacked. Years ago, I had this idea to exploit ride-hailing pricing algorithms using chaos theory. Another time, I used Laplace’s theorem to improve how to rate and choose products to buy. It started as a personal hobby, but when I casually shared these ideas on a second Twitter account, people loved them. They followed, engaged, and began using what I built. It was and still is a fun and surprisingly rewarding experience.
Then something shifted.
While reading Algorithms to Live By, a particular chapter on sorting caught my attention. It explored how we organize and rank things in life, and naturally, it brought up sports leagues. The whole purpose of a league, after all, is to figure out who the best teams are, efficiently. Computer science gives us several optimized approaches for that: single elimination, Swiss-system, etc. Formats that avoid unnecessary comparisons.
So why on earth do leagues like the NBA or LaLiga use round-robin formats where every team plays every other team? From an algorithmic standpoint, it's wasteful. It's inefficient.
Then came the golden line of the chapter:
Well, minimizing the number of games isn't actually in the league's interest. In computer science unnecessary comparisons are always bad, a waste of time and effort. But in sports that's far from the case. In many respects, after all, the games themselves are the point.
Leagues use long, complex formats not because they’re efficient, but because they’re fun. Because they build narratives. Because they generate moments. The goal isn’t speed; it’s engagement, entertainment, and sustainability.
And that’s when I realized: sometimes, math doesn’t need to win.
That moment felt like something new. For once, the powerful tools I’d always trusted didn’t really matter. And you know what? That was okay. Not everything needs to be faster. Not everything needs to be smarter. Sometimes, we just want to enjoy.
Show me the longer home route so I can finish that song I love. Recommend me a movie that's nothing like what I usually watch, maybe I’ll discover something unexpected. Find me that overpriced hardcover book, even though my Kindle is fully charged, just because I want to feel the pages in my hands.
Maybe life isn't always about being fast, cheap, or efficient. Maybe sometimes, the best choice is not to optimize at all. Just let it be. Forget the tools. Forget the rules. Just live. Who cares?