"The five fundamental operations of mathematics: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and modular forms."
What are these things? What madness lurks behind the lmfdb? Who invented them, and why!?
I'm gonna try and piece together an understanding from the bottom in a fairly handmade way rather than the usual way mathematics is done which typically has some pretensions to ahistoricity.
!til &modular-forms I've written up my understanding of what modular forms are here: https://graemephi.github.io/posts/modular-forms/ I've tried pretty hard to keep the maths simple and have pictures for the stuff that needs visual intuition. Also, I've come across some pretty good resources for learning this stuff so if nothing else my post will point you at good places to learn further if you, like me, want to know wtf modular forms are
!til The origin of &modular-forms, even though today they're just a number theory thing, was through the physics of... elastic ribbons!?
