About · Nathan

I’m Nathan. I’m drawn to the place where computation and mathematics meet: compiler design, finite automata, models of computation, simulation. Working out why something holds on paper, then writing the code that makes it hold on a machine, is the part I actually enjoy - the theory is the point, and the program is how I find out whether I understood it.

I’m currently pursuing a degree in computation and mathematics.

Alongside that I’m interested in philosophy and hacking, and I keep returning to the same lineage: von Neumann and the machines he imagined, John Archibald Wheeler, and the questions around von Neumann probes, robots and self-replicating systems - what it means for a thing to build a copy of itself, and where that idea stops being a metaphor.

Some of that lands as code. A recent one is an error-correcting program built from Reed-Solomon codes over GF(2^8): finite field arithmetic, generator polynomials and encoding all work, with Berlekamp-Massey in place for the decoding side. Correction isn’t finished yet.

Most of what I know, I learned by building it. That habit is what this blog is: write-ups where I work through a problem in public, including the parts that don’t work the first time.

What you’ll find here

Writing - mostly systems and compilers, with maths and machine learning mixed in.
Portfolio - projects I’ve built and the skills behind them.
Research - longer notes that haven’t become posts yet.

Elsewhere

Get in touch

Email: nathanpykimutai@gmail.com
Phone: +254 799 707 792

For anything that benefits from being public, the best way to reach me is to open an issue on this site’s repository - it keeps questions public and helps other people find the answers too.