Welcome! My name is Oak. Well, technically, my name is ‘Oak Hu’ (a five-letter string), while I’m Oak Hu (the person to whom ‘Oak Hu’ refers); but it’s almost always fine to be sloppy.

My parents named me ‘Oak’ after Oklahoma State University, where they went for graduate school.

My last name, ‘Hu’, is from the Chinese 胡; appending 说 (‘speak’) yields 胡说 (‘nonsense’)—naturally, someone named ‘Oak Hu’ does philosophy.

I do mathematics and philosophy—the two armchair disciplines—at Magdalen College, Oxford.

My main academic interests are in the areas of philosophy where you find λ-terms: the formal semantics of natural language, and applications of higher-order logic to metaphysics.

I occasionally get sidetracked into doing other weekend projects, like this wavefunction visualisation, this evolutionary branching simulation, or this toy language model which has seen nothing but three of Timothy Williamson’s books.

This website also hosts some personal writing and university essays; but you’ll probably be more interested in the work posted on my Substack.

You can reach me by email at [email protected] or on Signal at oak.76.

This site was set up with substantial help from Gemini and Claude. The wallpaper is adapted from an photograph taken while visiting Wuzhen (乌镇) in August 2025. Since then, I’ve left the UK for a rationality camp reunion in Hostačov; a philosophy conference in New York City; and an economics retreat in San Salvador.