Did my PhD in the area of compressed sensing; took a couple classes from Emmanuel Candés while he was at Caltech.

The leap from the RIP to consciousness is … big. But the wonder of mathematics does this kind of thing to me too. Sometimes you see a result so cool and wild that you have the sense that it encodes a secret of the universe; this feeling is why I got into mathematics to begin with.

Articles like this make me feel bad. Many articles on HN do this to me, but ones like this in particular. I can sense the author's excitement, and everything sounds so profound, yet I have no clue what any of it actually means. The worst part is, even if it was ELI5, I'm fairly sure I'd still be lost. I guess I'll just go eat more Pop Tarts.

Compressive sensing does have this mystical effect on people.