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.

Yes, exactly. That sense of “secret of the universe encoded in a proof” is what I was trying to put words around. I know the jump from RIP to consciousness is huge; I’m not claiming a formal bridge, more that the shape of the constraint feels like an echo of something lived. A kind of resonance between mathematics as a language of limits and consciousness as the negotiation (or compilation?) of them. Your PhD work & courses with Candés as grounding makes you uniquely able to sense when leaps are being made. Thanks for your comment!