Hobbies and interests outside mathematics

I am an avid reader of fantasy books: I have read the most important sagas written by (in alphabetical order) T. Brooks, D. Eddings, T. Goodkind, E. Greenwood, T. Hickman and M. Weis, G. R. R. Martin, R. Jordan, J.K. Rowling, R.A. Salvatore, J.R.R. Tolkien and M. Zimmer Bradley.

I'm also fond of historical novels, especially if set in Ancient Greece or Rome, such us the ones by Valerio Massimo Manfredi.

Passing to the non-fiction world, I like from time to time to keep up my (high school) knowledge of philosophy, by reading nice divulgation or directly some original works written in a witty style (Voltaire is the best example).

The same motivations can't of course hold for mathematics, but I still find it fascinating how several people have managed to tell interesting and understandable "stories" of basic concepts that I know very well from the technical point-of-view, but that I wouldn't be able to explain to my grandmother (Einstein, did you say something?): from the "classics" authors such as Bertrand Russell to the modern Piergiorgio Odifreddi, Gabriele Lolli and Mario Livio.

Lastly, I have a special appreciation for certain "unconventional" authors, which cannot be easily classified, although they all share some grains of lovely nonsense: I will mention Walter Moers, Italo Calvino, Douglas Adams, Stefano Benni, Lewis Carrol and Boris Vian.

If you are interested, here is my Librarything bookshelf (my Anobii one is no longer updated).

My other favourite hobby is board gaming. I'm a big fan of hardcore Eurogames (i.e. resource management, worker placement, area control, etc.); I am not scared by the long playing time or the heavy rulebook, as long as the mechanics shows some interesting or original features. Among my favourite "classics", which take 2-3 hours to play, I'll mention, in chronological order, Puerto Rico, Power grid, Caylus, Agricola, Dominant Species, Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar, Lords of Waterdeep and Caverna. More recent ones include Terraforming Mars, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Gaia Project, Teotihuacan, Eclipse: New Dawn for the Galaxy, Ark Nova and Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory.

Less heavy but still interesting games, which can be played in around 1 hour and which I used/use to introduce newcomers to the world of modern board games, include Ticket to Ride, 7 Wonders, Evolution: Climate, Not Alone, Azul, Wingspan and Res Arcana. Party games (especially those based on social deduction) are not my cup of tea, but I appreciate the simplicity of some of them, which come very useful as fillers while waiting for all the people to gather up, or to conclude the night after some heavier game. I particularly like word games, such as Codenames or Just One.

I am also fond of games which simulate intricate historical events, such as Twilight Struggle, Wir sind das Volk and its wonderful 2+2 expansion; on similar lines, I am looking forward to try 1989: Dawn of Freedom, Imperial Struggle or Polis in the future. I am not a fan of wargames, especially the tactical ones, but I like those which mix political elements with large-scale conflicts, e.g. Triumph & Tragedy and Consequence & Conquest, and where the emphasis is more on the global events than the detailed military simulations.

If you want to play with me online, I'm Lolindir Minyatur on Board Games Arena and on BoardGame Core (RIP).

When I lived in Utrecht I was an active participant in the meetups Weighted Dice Utrecht - Board Gaming Community and Board Games Meetup. In Würzburg I am a member of Fantasy Spiele and I attend (more or less regularly) the Friday Night Games.

I have over 10 years of Dungeons&Dragons experience: my characters have hailed from Greyhawk and from the Forgotten Realms of the 2°, 3.0 and (mostly) 3.5 editions; I also had a few experiences as a Dungeon Master (mainly with published adventures, such as "Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil").

Unfortunately, the main disadvantage of this activity is the need of a fixed group of people, willing to meet regularly and constantly spend time between sessions; considering also the shortage of skilled and available DMs, the new editions which prevent the use of the new published adventures, and an irreversible trend toward power-playing or worse (don't read just generically "munchkin"; dare to read "psionic powers"), my playing friends and I decided to (temporarily) end our campaigns and "convert" to board games.

However, due our geographical spread (and, more recently, also the pandemic), in 2018 we have started to play again shorter adventures via Discord and Roll20, using simpler and quicker roleplaying games such as 7th sea, Ninja Crusade, Shadow of the Demon Lord, Star Wars: Force and Destiny, Heart: The City Beneath, Godsend, Beacon, and The One Ring.

Participating actively to the wikipedia community has always been one of my long-term plan, as well as a moral duty, given how much I use it every day without giving anything in return. For several years I have eased my conscience from this task by making small donations, but in February 2018 I registered for the first time, and since then I have been doing small occasional improvements to the English-language and the Italian-language wikipedias. Since February 2021 I have been trying to make more substantial contributions, I created a few new pages, and I joined the Wikiproject Mathematics. Here is my user wikipage, where you can see the list of pages I created or contributed to expand.

I strongly encourage you to join us! Read this guide to get started but be aware that Wikipedia is a different environment than academia. Here is a nice guide on Wikipedia editing for mathematicians.

I have never been interested in psychology until I discover this Myers-Briggs Type Indicator theory, inspired by the works of Carl Gustav Jung. It is a model of human cognitive processes, based on four dicotomies (Introversion/Extraversion, iNtuition/Sensation, Thinking/Feeling, Judgement/Perception) and eight cognitive functions; I am INTJ and my functions are, in order, Ni Te Fi Se.

It is important to stress that this theory is not strictly scientific and does (should) not pretend to be so (although it is used - possibly wrongly - by some companies while hiring new employees): human behaviour does not share the uniform rational traits of nature, so it's clearly impossible to fully classify the human population in only sixteen type of people. On the other hand, it can't be simply reduced to a sort of astrology (or other pseudoscience of your choice).

Apart from its indisputable symmetrical beauty, I have found it quite useful on a personal level: it has given me a nice "language" to understand better myself and other people, a sort of "human ethology" that has provided me with specific names to describe some differences between people that I have always perceived. Adopting this practical and guru-free perspective, I believe it could be useful to many other people.

I have also looked a bit into other models of this kind (socionics, enneagrams, Big Fives, etc.), but I find them too mysterious/esoteric and less interesting than MBTI.

In the (now rarer and rarer) moments of holidays, while lying on the sunny seasides of Southern Italy, my favourite activity is to solve crosswords, sudoku and other alphanumerical puzzles. When I was learning Dutch, I have also been solving some Kruiswoordraadselen, and when learning German I repeated the experience with Kreuzworträtsel.

I have never been an active videogamer as I was a roleplaygamer, and because of both personal preferences and old fashioned hardware I played mainly retrò style games: RTS (The War of the Ring, Battle for the Middle Earth), city building (Zeus: Master of Olympus, Caesar III), RPG (Baldur's Gate, Temple of Elemental Evil) and racing (Lego Racers, Re-Volt). In any case, thinking of "games in my past", the first two words that come to my mind are "Pokémon" and "gameboy". God bless the emulators.

When I was a child, I had been playing the piano (mainly classical music) for eight years. I have never attended a proper music school, relying instead on private lessons given by a friend of my parents. Unfortunately, I discovered only much later that this style of teaching "here is a partitura [how did they come up with the term "musical score"?], read it and play it over and over until you reach an acceptable level; then take another one and repeat the procedure" was not at all suited for me.

I completely lacked a global vision over the contents I was playing, both from an historical and from a technical pont-of-view. I learnt only "how to play", i.e., how to move the fingers in order to reproduce harmonious sounds, but it was a bit like reading a book written in an unknown language with a known alphabet.

Given these premises, of course this hobby died of inertia, and only after several years, when talking to some mathematicians-musicians, I discovered the existence of a proper music theory, much more complicated (and thus much more interesting) than just reading the seven notes plus some adagio, allegretto, andante and other fancy old-fashioned words (which I discovered only later to be internationally used, and not limited to Italy). Afterwards, I happened to read that fantastic, autoreferential and metafictional piece of art named "Gödel, Escher, Bach", and I definitely convinced myself that sooner or later I will need to start again my relationship with music, with a completely different approach.

During 2014, thanks to Collegio Einaudi, I discovered bridge card game. In the spring 2015 I attended a course at a local bridge club, after which I participated into some (amateur) tournaments. Unfortunately when I moved to Utrecht I was forced to stop; I have never had the intention of playing in any way professionally, but I would like to informally continue participating in small tournaments among friends (not necessarily in an organised club).

Several times in my life I happened to think "when I will retire, I want to do this". Since I don't know if and when I will retire, I should at least mention these not well defined plans for the future:

• Learn to seriously play chess (I can't stand all the times people told me "you're a mathematician? So you must be a chess expert!")

• Study some linguistics (even just learning the IPA could be a good start) - under the influence of my sister Eleonora Cattafi I happily discovered how fascinating this field could be

• Learn Quenya (I'm a snob High Elf, Sindarin is not welcome)

• Learn Esperanto: this could be probably much easier (though not necessarily more useful, given the number of speakers of these two said languages) 

• Read the Bible: independently of my religious beliefs (which started - as if I had a choice - as Roman Catholic, and underwent several modifications up to some form of deism, which makes me irreligious from the practical point of view, but highly interested in spirituality from the abstract philosophical one), I have always wanted to read one of the most influential book in the Western history, both to question what I was taught as a kid with a Protestant-like mindset, and from a purely fantasy-genre lover point-of-view, wondering if Christian mythology could be as interesting as Greek one

• Study musical theory (see my piano experience above)

• Play bridge semi-seriously (again, see above)

• Finish writing the D&D setting my friends and I were developing when we were in high school