Other personal pages worth a visit

A reading trail · Alejandro Rivero

Other personal corners of the web, in approximate order of resemblance to the interests and habits of this site: crossing between science, computing, history, literature, languages, art and practical experiments, and keeping a public notebook over many years. Shared breadth matters more here than sharing a physics speciality. This is a reading trail and a claim of kinship in method, and it says nothing about scientific merit or about agreement with the views on the pages linked.

The order was revised on 21 September 2026 against thirty years of recovered bookmarks. Where a site was actually bookmarked, the years are given; the ones without a year are known from elsewhere. The list is also available as JSON for anyone who wants to reuse it.

1. David Madore — Mathematics, computing, languages, literary fragments and an extensive personal weblog. An especially close match to following a technical question into quite different subjects.
2. John Baez — Mathematical physics and networks alongside a long-running diary, wide-ranging explanations and This Week's Finds. A close neighbour in both subject matter and the tradition of building a personal web archive. Bookmarked 1996 and 1997, then 2013–2014: This Week's Finds in August 1996, the papers in March 1997, and nine issues later kept in a folder of their own.
3. Cosma Shalizi — Statistical physics, complex systems and statistics, surrounded by notebooks, book reviews, old books and essays. Particularly close to the meeting of technical work, history of ideas and omnivorous reading. Bookmarked 1997, when the notebooks still lived at Wisconsin.
4. Michael Nielsen — Quantum computing, AI, tools for thought and how science works, with explorations of art and religion. A public notebook that treats learning and the organisation of knowledge as subjects in their own right.
5. John Walker — Fourmilab brings together software, scientific experiments, historical documents, book reviews and photography. A particularly rich example of the web as a personal workshop and library. Legacy site; Walker died in 2024.
6. Gwern Branwen — AI and statistics alongside psychology, economics, anime, literary criticism, fiction, self-experiments and archival material. Close to the breadth of the interests here and the habit of connecting apparently unrelated questions.
7. Lieven Le Bruyn — neverendingbooks moves between algebra and geometry, books, games, art and history. A research notebook with plenty of side paths, rather than a narrowly professional homepage.
8. Greg Egan — Science fiction alongside mathematical and physical explorations, interactive visualisations and essays. A strong match for testing an idea through both calculation and imagination.
9. J. C. (Clint) Sprott — Chaos and plasma physics, downloadable programs, fractal art, photographs, MIDI music and memoirs. A long-lived personal website where scientific work and hobbies share the same front door. Bookmarked 1997: The Wonders of Physics.
10. Donald Knuth — Algorithms and programming together with typography, mathematical writing, computer musings, a pipe organ and musical composition. Especially relevant to the craft of making and explaining things.
11. Bret Victor — Humane computing, tools for understanding, scientific visualisation, electronics, climate and visual design. A personal collection of working demonstrations, essays and talks about how people might think and create.
12. Nicky Case — Playable explanations of epidemics, trust, segregation and attention, with the source published for each. The same conviction as Victor's, that an idea is understood when it can be operated. Bookmarked 2020: the playable COVID-19 simulations.
13. Erik Demaine — Algorithms and geometry meet origami, puzzles, sculpture, mathematical typefaces and teaching. A good continuation of the practical-experiment and recreational-mathematics paths through this site.
14. David E. Joyce — Euclid's Elements with diagrams that can be dragged, the history of mathematics, Mandelbrot and Julia sets, wallpaper groups and a short course on trigonometry, kept at Clark University since the mid-1990s. The Euclid pages were read here in May 1997 for the Alexandria essays. Bookmarked 1997.
15. David D. Friedman — An economist and law professor's site that also holds his novels, medieval hobbies, lecture recordings and a long-running blog, alongside The Machinery of Freedom. The breadth of a working life kept in one place, whatever one makes of the economics. Bookmarked 1997: the Santa Clara faculty page.
16. Robin Hanson — Economics, prediction markets and the far future, with a physics past and the blog Overcoming Bias. In 1996 he kept a list of backlink projects that the WWW6 paper from this site cites. Linked from the 1996 backlinks paper.
17. John D. Norton — History and philosophy of physics, with a shelf of “Goodies”: Einstein's Zurich notebook page by page, thought experiments, a dome that breaks determinism. The historian's way of reading a physicist's working papers. Bookmarked 2015: the Zurich notebook.
18. Philippe Hurbain (Philo) — Measurements of every Lego motor, the insides of the NXT, sensors built from scratch, and a workshop of mechanisms documented as carefully as a laboratory. The engineering counterpart of the hobby pages here. Bookmarked 2017, in the Lego-mechanisms folder.
19. Tomi Engdahl — ePanorama: an electronics engineer's collection of circuits, audio, video, telecom and computer notes, grown out of pages he began at the Helsinki University of Technology in the mid-1990s, now with a blog. His VGA-to-television converter was bookmarked in December 1996 during the hardware fortnight. Bookmarked 1996.
20. Frank Dodd “Tony” Smith Jr. — A sprawling collection connecting Clifford algebras, exceptional groups and speculative particle models with art, music and religion. The resemblance is in exploratory breadth, without endorsement of the models. Archived homepage, captured in 2015; Smith died in 2019. Bookmarked 2012: E6, strings, branes and the Standard Model.
21. Andrew Oh-Willeke — Dispatches from Turtle Island: a lawyer's daily reading of particle physics, cosmology, genetics and ancient history, with the sources always linked. Close to the habit of following the literature from outside the profession. Bookmarked 2016 and 2019, including a post on balancing Standard Model fermions and bosons.
22. Hans de Vries — Chip Architect: a processor engineer's notes on physics, from the fine-structure constant to the geometry of spinors, written with an engineer's diagrams. An independent path to some of the same numerical puzzles. Bookmarked 2019: an exact formula for the electromagnetic coupling constant.
23. Juan F. González — The Spectrum of Riemannium: several hundred numbered logs on physics and mathematics, from special relativity to the exceptional groups, by a teacher writing for the pleasure of it. Bookmarked 2017: LOG#196, on the superbootstrap.
24. Francisco R. Villatoro — La Ciencia de la Mula Francis: daily science commentary in Spanish, from particle physics to mathematics and the history of both, sustained for more than fifteen years. Bookmarked 2013 and 2020.
25. Clifford Johnson — Asymptotia combines physics with visual art, comics, science communication and cultural life. A useful bridge between research and the different ways of telling stories about it.
26. Tommaso Dorigo — Particle physics, statistics and the personal life of research in A Quantum Diaries Survivor. His earlier blog also hosts part of my own discussion history.
27. Scott Aaronson — Quantum computing and complexity, with teaching notes, older writings and a broadly discursive personal blog. A neighbour in explaining technical ideas while keeping the surrounding arguments and questions visible. Bookmarked 2021.
28. Peter Woit — Mathematical physics and the long public conversation about fundamental theory at Not Even Wrong. A more subject-specific connection, and another meeting point in this archive.
29. Urs Schreiber — Geometry, higher structures and fundamental physics developed through interconnected online research notes. A more specialised match to the mathematical-foundations strand, rather than to the whole range of this site. Bookmarked 2017: the nLab entry on exceptional generalized geometry.

Six of these were added in September 2026 because the bookmarks showed them being read for years without ever being listed: Case, Norton, Hurbain, Oh-Willeke, de Vries and González, with Villatoro as the Spanish-language reference. Four more came from the 1995–1997 bookmarks and the recovered pages of the same years: Joyce, Friedman and Engdahl were bookmarked then, and Hanson is cited in the 1996 backlinks paper. Sites that appear in the bookmarks as sources rather than as personal notebooks, such as the Reference Frame or the n-Category Café, are cited on the bookmarks page instead.