--- title: About Levi Neuwirth date: 2026-03-16 abstract: An extensive introduction to who I am, what defines me, what I do, tools I use, etc. For a more concise, professionally formatted synopsis, see the Biography page linked from the site index. tags: [meta] status: "Draft" confidence: 90 importance: 2 scope: personal novelty: moderate practicality: high --- How does one resolve the age-old dilemma of earnest self description? Is any such act of description overly humiliating and reductive in nature? Hubristic and egotistical, on the contrary? I have pondered over this subject for years, my greatest conclusion being that my actions and character should be the pinnacle of how I am described, for these form the pinnacle of what constitutes me. I understand that this presents an issue: casual surfers of this website, curious readers of my research or other output, and even, believe it or not, myself, for my own personal reference on sporadic occasion, would benefit from an attempted summary in words of who I am. I am obliged to deliver, and such a summary follows. --- ## Basic Traits I have always thought that the defining characteristic of what makes Levi *Levi*, in so far as I or anyone have such a thing^[My chief concern throughout this document, as established in the introduction, is establishing a balance between reductivity and egotism. The broader conclusion I have come to? Human lives and persona cannot be mapped onto human language. Interesting!], is the combination of my **curiosity** and **creativity**. This is not a curiosity that manifests purely in the abstract. I am certainly interested in abstract things, rabbit holes, all-nighters composed of study, you name it - but I am equally curious in a more tangible sense, one that invokes the process of creation. Much of the substance of my life has been the result of various incarnations of this latter form of curiosity combined with a creativity whose origin I cannot explain. In a concise way, I could state it as follows: I generally feel a strong urge to produce and put my own spin on *anything* that I consume. ### Greatest Strength and Flaw The realization of this curiosity/creativity complex yields what I find simultaneously as my greatest strength and my most detrimental flaw. I can be relentlessly ambitious and work persistently towards goals that others might dismiss as too far-sighted, impossible, etc. - but I also consistently bite off more than I can chew and overwork myself. I'm at least aware of the latter fact and try to counter it by introducing work that I enjoy, such as work on this website! ### Aphantasia I have [**complete aphantasia**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia), which means that I cannot visualize anything in my mind. My mind works entirely off of linguistic and indescribable "visualizations." This has had a profound impact on my life. I did not realize that others could visualize actual images in their mind (I thought that when people spoke of this, they were being highly metaphorical and or poetic) until I was in high school. I believe that my aphantasia is the reason that I am so affected by words (both in prose and poetry) and music as not only mere artistic forms but means of utmost expression. I do not think that I would find such necessity for creative expression through these means without my aphantasia, and as such, I prefer living with aphantasia to living the normal way. ### Favorites [I GENERALLY DO NOT HAVE A FAVORITE X OR Y.]{.smallcaps} I take two primary issues with the notion of "favorite" as it is used in coloquial American English: first, that one's "favorite X" is often conflated, whether explicitly or implicitly by said one, with "the best X." For any instance where I *do* have have a favorite, I do *not* make any assertion that my favorite X is necessarily the best X out of all possible choices of X. Second, I believe that the action of selecting a favorite is inherently reductive and forces comparisons that are invalid. We are not computers, and we should not be organizing everything into tensors for comparison and floating point operations. Let us enjoy diversity and variance for what they are rather than try to reduce everything to a mere favorite! #### The one exception With this said, there is one major exception, and that is my favorite book: *The Brothers Karamazov*, by [Fyodor Dostoevsky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyodor_Dostoevsky). I cannot understate the impact that this book had on my life, and it is thus my favorite; I carry it with me essentially at all times, and reread at least *some* section of it nearly every day. ## Education ### University I am currently finishing my senior year at **Brown University**, from which I will graduate with degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science in May. This autumn I will begin my graduate studies in Computer Science. I chose these areas because their generality and broad interaction with abstraction captivated me in a notable way. This fact is still true to this day - I have never felt significant burnout, nor felt that I had exhausted some finite supply of interest and curiosity in my chosen fields. ### Autodidacticism The bulk of what I have learned has been on an individual basis rather than in affiliation with some institution. This is merely a personal preference; I do not think that autodidactic learning is uniformly intrinsically better, nor do I believe that is necessarily more efficient or otherwise superior to learning through an institution. It is simply what I have always known works for me, and my intuition in this regard has been substantiated by years of empirical evidence.^[Read: progressing through the formalisms of various educational institutions. My grievances are primarily with the public school system that I endured for 13 years of my life, in which autodidacticism was actively perceived as contrary to the goals of the institution, whereas autodidacticism is essentially implied at the University level, or, at a minimum, at a University as rigorous at Brown.] ### Study Habits A core element of my autodidacticism and one that I write about with frequency is what I call *metalearning* - the notion that frequent study of *how* to study itself is a worthy, if not necessary, undertaking. To this end, I try to keep my own study habits somewhere at the midpoint between the relevent cognitive psychology literature and my own intuition of what works best for me. I broadly adopt technologies that assist me in learning, and generally do so without reservations. I believe in the capability of (ethically designed and well-intentioned) technology to augment the power of human intellect. I firmly believe that the technologies that I use, both the ones that through societial usage are taken for granted, and those that are perhaps more novel, strongly augment my ability to think, learn, and create. The key word in the previous sentence is **augment**, and the delineation between **augmentation** and **automation** is a crucial one. I will *not* use technologies such as Generative AI to automate away my cognitive processes. I believe that synergistic augmentation is the way forward in the current age of much technological excitement, rather than automation with subsequent deprication of what it means to be human. --- ## Computer Science and Mathematics I fell in love with computation at a young age. I have been fascinated, inspired, and motivated by the beauty, elegance, and universality of the subject for as long as I can remember. In elementary school I was writing basic programs and text-based games. In high school, I tried to write programs to do my homework, albeit in Java. I recall successfully implementing a statistical suite from scratch with nothing but `java.util.Scanner`, and, later, failing to successfully write a program to do my tedious AP Calculus homework. I fell in love with Artificial Intelligence during my first semester at Brown. My first computer science final project was to write an implementation of generalized Connect 4, including an AI player. The AI player was simple, and "AI" in this context refers to the grand scheme of the field, not the coloquial usage referring exclusively to large language models / generative models. After much hard work, when I finished the project, I decided to see if my creation could beat me in a game of Connect 4. (I had studied previously some strategies in Connect 4, in the hopes of consistently beating my high school friends, so I was fairly confident in my abilities being above-average.) Needless to say, my creation immediately defeated me decisively. The next morning this result was reproduced several more times. This absolutely amazed me, and provided me with an undying capitvation that has yet to be exhausted. **Mathematics** and I have a more complicated history. I always loved mathematics in school, yet it was consistently the lowest grade on my report card. Where I really fell in love with mathematics was when I began to learn algebra and venture into the realm of the abstract. The idea of a function was captivating to me as an 8th grader. (It is still captivating to me to this day, somehow.) I entered Brown thinking that I preferred and intended to study physics, but quickly learned that the mathematics underneath the Physics was what I truly enjoyed. In my sophomore year, I "hopped down the street", so to speak^[Kassar House, home of Brown's department of mathematics, is just down the street (George Street, to be precise) from Barus & Holley, which *used* to be most notable as the home of the physics department.] and haven't looked back since. I have long said to friends that one does not "do mathematics," but rather "mathematics does you," and this encapsulates how I feel about mathematics better than anything else I can think of at the moment. Mathematics is endlessly creative and has, to me, unlimited intrigue. I vividly remember learning about the [Sylow Theorems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylow_theorems) in my 3rd semester abstract algebra course - my first math upper level - and feeling a sense of absolute wonder and beauty at the proof, yes, but moreso at the grandeur of human genius - that *we* were able to derive this result, and so many subsequent ones, and that I had the power to understand it just the same!^[Which was perhaps *not* evident based off my score for the final exam of that course, but I digress.] ## Music Music is core to who I am. I have played trumpet, my primary instrument, for the majority of my life. I also play piano, horn, trombone, euphonium, tuba, and a bit of drums. More important to me than playing, however, is composition. I feel that my compositions are fundamentally a part of me, an extension of the person that I am. ### Composition ::: {.score-fragment score-name="Violin Sonata - III (2021)" score-caption="A short excerpt from the third movement of my Violin Sonata, composed in October 2021."} ![](scores/vln.svg) ::: ::: dropcap COMPOSITION [IS]{.smallcaps} PERHAPS MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE THE PRACTICE [OF MY]{.smallcaps} LIFE. I say these strong words because I feel strongly about this process. Composition uses the entirety of not only my mind and my intellectual power, but also the entirety of my essence. When I am immersed in a composition, I am the composition, and the composition is me. We are wholly isomorphic. Thus, my compositions function in many manners: they are time capsules, they are personifications, or, if you like, anthropomorphisms of some sort; they are expressions of the Universe, or whatever *you* prefer to call them. They are, and they will continue to pour out of me, because as far as I can tell, it is by my pen that my *life* is defined. ::: Music composition is thus **chiefly distinct** from other forms of creative activity for me. Music is the most rewarding for me, invoking the most passion, and it is the medium by which I feel I have the most expression potential and the most capacity to express.^[These are two different things for me. By **expression potential**, I mean the range of sentiments and ideas that music can, in the abstract / in principle, express. This **expression potential** is thus innately provided to me by mere virtue of my partaking in the act of writing music. By **capacity to express**, I am referring to my own personal ability as a composer to successfully express *that which I intend to* rather than the full range of what music itself might be able to encapsulate.] When I hear a composition that I have finished it surmounts me and effortlessly transports me into an immersive state; I am returned to the deep feelings and profound^[Not necessarily in grandeur, but in personal depth.] ideas that I tried to capture through my project. On the contrary, music also torments me. I am something of a perfectionist with my compositions and get frustrated when they do not pan out the way I intend. I scrap many projects that I perceive as insufficient, and when ideas are not flowing, I suffer for it. Luckily, since composition is such a core constituent of who I am, I have found a consistency in my undergraduate years, and the ideas have generally flowed without significant pause since 2023. I can only hope for my own sake that this trend continues far into the future. ::: {.score-fragment score-name="Violin Sonata - I (2026)" score-caption="A short excerpt from the first movement of my Flute Sonata, composed in January 2026."} ![](scores/fl.svg) ::: --- ## Interests I have many interests, and while they can be *temporarily* all-consuming, I try not to let any singular interest of mine define me.^[In the past I allowed myself to be more "defined" by my passions, at least in my self-image. (I can't control how *you* define me, but I can control how *I* define me, after all, and *that* is to me the most important definition.) These days I believe that if such an all-encompassing definition is necessary it must be built from a higher level of abstraction than any singular interest - rather, what are the specific qualities that are brought to any interest? It is not the fact that I do many things but the manners in which and reasons for which I do them that should be the basis of the definition. *Exiting Modernity* talks at great length along these lines.] (The distinction I am making between "interest" and "passion" should be apparent here.) Some of my interests are chiefly **sporadic**; every once in a a while (a while might be a month, a year, etc.), I find myself immersed in and unable to escape the interest for a week or two. Other interests are more constant in my life. My foremost interest is perhaps a metainterest - I'm interested in increasing the variance within my life's experiences, and thus interests that are iterative and provide me the opportunity to do previously unknown things and expand my horizons are generally the most potent to me. ### Foreign Languages I am extremely interested in **Foreign Language**, and most fortunate to be a native speaker of English, given that I grew up in the United States. This awards me the privilege of having access to a wealth of materials in my mother tongue for learning just about anything, including just about any language. The study of languages other than English is an absolute constant in my life; it has been for years and will persist for many more! I will mention a few important ones here. #### Spanish #### Chinese #### Danish #### German