Other stuff
Awards
Honourable mention for the B. H. Neumann Prize, 2022.
The first time I met Ben Burton
I first "met" Ben in 2012, when he was the guest speaker at an awards presentation for students who had performed well in the Australian Mathematics Competition (AMC) that year; I happened to be one of those students. At the time, I had never even considered the possibility of studying maths at university, let alone the possibility that in front of me was my future Honours and PhD supervisor. My only memento of this occasion is a very blurry photo (I'm not even sure where that certificate is anymore).
General topology
When I first encountered the notion of a topological space, I was struck by the feeling that the definition seemed incredibly unmotivated (apparently, I am not alone). At some point, this drove me to start writing out my own notes on general topology. Unsurprisingly, I quickly found this project to be much bigger than I had the time to complete. At the very least, I managed to turn one section of these notes into a short standalone introduction to general topology, which draws together some motivation and intuition for the definitions of topological spaces and continuous functions. I leave it to the interested reader to judge whether this document is useful.