About

My name is Ayman Hindy, and my path to this site has wound through several fields in academia and industry. It began with engineering and computer science, which I studied and practiced early on. MIT came next, with a master's degree, a doctorate and research at the frontier of finance. Then came four years teaching at Stanford Graduate School of Business, followed by more than thirty years managing investments. Retired now from professional investing, I advise and sit on the boards of funds and of companies across several areas of technology.

Keep Learning is my motto, and a habit I have kept since I first learned to read. Take a question that sounds simple but is not. Break it into pieces small enough to digest. See how it connects to ideas from other fields. Then write a short explainer: first for myself, to make sure the pieces hold together, and then for like-minded colleagues, whose feedback sharpens it.

Two principles guide the habit:

• Build a mental map of the whole subject, where the pieces fit well together.
• Be rigorous and correct, but use the simplest possible language.

I keep three working notebooks this way: one on intelligence and AI, one on mathematics, computer science and physics, and one on finance and economics.

On this site I share the habit and the notes with a wider audience. Asking the right questions and thinking from first principles matter more than ever at a time when answers are easy to come by and hard to check. I hope that these pieces prove useful and that some readers start notebooks of their own.

The book. From Computation to Thinking asks how a machine that only follows rules comes to read, reason and act, and what that means for the people whose work it touches. I made it for a curious friend, not a specialist. AI models wrote the text under my direction; how the book was written explains who did what.

Articles. Shorter pieces, often ideas in progress before they grow into something longer. They come from the same notebooks, so they range across AI, mathematics, physics and finance.

Talk back. Every chapter and article has a comment box. Comments appear after I read them. If you would rather write to me privately, the same box can send your note to me alone.