The prettiest maths notes on the internet

Read colourful, interactive lecture notes I wrote for courses from the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, full of extra intuition and explanation.

11 articles, 14929 words

Go to my favourite course

Course List

Frequently Asked Questions

How does the sidebar work?
It's just like a filetree! Each folder is expandable and denoted with the icon, containing coursesand articles. Courses themselves contain more folders and articles, which can be viewed once inside the course. You can also use keyboard shortcuts to toggle the sidebar / to search.
Why are there some articles that aren't part of a course?
They're basically blog entries - I wanted a place to put explanations of topics I find interesting.
What makes these notes better than Dexter, zeramorphic or Daniel Naylor?
After my fair share of browsing tripos notes online, I realized that everything's written in LaTeX. Booo, boring! I like colours and diagrams! If you want bog-standard soulless LaTeX notes though, this is not the website for you :)
How do you write these lecture notes?
  • A private Github repository contains all of the content, written in markdown. I use Inkscape to draw diagrams.
  • I configured a VSCode shortcut to compile the markdown files into webpages and preview the result.
  • When I am happy with my changes, I push them to the repository, and the public site automatically redeploys (I added a hook).
How did you make this website?
  • I use Next.js as the framework, with styling from Tailwind. The web app is hosted on Vercel.
  • I wrote a static site generator (SSG) in Python to transform my lecture note files (.md) into Next.js webpages, and extract metadata. The SSG works by first running markdown2, then injecting the result into my own Jinja2 templates, then wrapping in boilerplate React. This is a great opportunity to shove a diagram in your face:
    file.mdcontent.htmlpage.htmlpage.jsmarkdown2jinja2wrap
    The SSG is about 400 lines of spaghetti code - here's a "little" sample.
What are some cool features this site has?
  • Colour schemes (select in sidebar) - persistent via local storage
  • Math diagrams that match the colour scheme
  • Keyboard shortcuts to toggle filetree and to search
  • Spoilers like this one
  • Copy buttons like this one

Have a new topic idea? Want me to add a new feature / colour scheme? Feel free to email me or visit my homepage.
Enjoy exploring!

Hero image on sanctum theme "Artist's blossom" by Inkonic (modified here) is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Changelog

28/06/25

Added

Changed

  • Homepage revamp:
    • added hero section (different for different themes)
    • About section -> FAQ section
  • changed domain to tripos.guru

19/12/24

Changed

  • changed domain blog.danielc.rocks -> notes.danielc.rocks; primary purpose of the site is now storage of course notes
  • consistent styling of theorems, defns, examples etc
  • replace dark theme with light theme for easier readability

08/07/24

Added

  • highlighting in search results
  • copy buttons for code
  • "copy article plaintext" option

12/06/24

Added

  • this changelog
  • list of recent articles
  • search and filetree modals
  • keyboard shortcuts

Changed

  • sidebar now toggleable
  • site more responsively designed and mobile-friendly

11/07/23

Added

  • this website (domain blog.danielc.rocks)

Contains 12 articles