đŸȘŽ Oak Hu

About

2 min read

Welcome!

My name is Oak.1 I do math and philosophy—the two armchair disciplines—at Magdalen College, Oxford.

I last left and will next leave Oxford for:

  • Hostačov, Czechia (ESPR Reunion, 1–3 November)
  • New York City, USA (8th Higher-Order Metaphysics Workshop, 14–17 November)

My main interests are in the subfields of philosophy where you see λ-terms: the formal semantics of natural language, as well as higher-order logic and its applications to metaphysics. These also happen to be the two areas where current LLMs are actually useful, for generating linguistic data and for cleaning up proofs, respectively.

This site halfheartedly hosts copies of my philosophy essays (for undergraduate classes) and notes (for graduate seminars), but mostly not for other humans to read. You’ll be much more interested in the work on my Substack.

My favorite non-Oxford places (with fantastic greenery, lighting, & food):

I’ve pledged to donate 10% of my income—or 1% of spending money, while studying—to wherever it can do the most good. I think you should too!

Please note that this site is under (very sporadic) construction.

Footnotes

  1. Well, technically, my name is ‘Oak Hu’ (a five-letter string), while I am Oak Hu (the person to whom ‘Oak Hu’ refers); but it’s fine to be sloppy in almost all contexts. My parents named me ‘Oak’ after Oklahoma State University, where they went for graduate school. My last name, ‘Hu’, is from the Chinese èƒĄ; appending èŻŽ (‘speak’) yields èƒĄèŻŽ (‘nonsense’)—naturally, someone named ‘Oak Hu’ does philosophy. ↩