My movie reviews

I enjoy watching movies, thinking about them, and trying to verbalize my impressions. I do all that on Letterboxd. From time to time, you might also see me mention a movie that I particularly liked on X (formerly Twitter).

Some of my favourite movies are Forrest Gump, La La Land, Your Name. (Kimi no Na wa), and Whiplash.
Some of the movie reviews that I put a lot of thought into are for Gifted, Marriage Story, and The Bit Player.

Some music recommendations

I love music, both listening to it and (even more so) making it. I play the violin and the viola and I sing, albeit all three at best at a tolerable level. 

Here's an unstructured overview over some recordings, videos, and even a music-related podcast that I like:

• Basically anything sung by Jeremy Jordan. Some of my personal favourites are his renditions of From Now On, It's All Coming Back to Me Now, Losing My Mind, She Used to Be Mine, and Without a Believer.

• Almost all performances by Renée Rapp. Particularly impressive are her interpretations of Dancing On My Own and I Have Nothing.

• Igor Levits Klavierpodcast - 32 x Beethoven (in German)

• Jean-Baptiste Accolay's Violin Concerto No.1 in A minor, for example played by Itzhak Perlman in his Concertos from My Childhood 

• Max Bruch's Romance in F for Viola and Orchestra, for example played by Janine Jansen in Mendelssohn & Bruch: Violin Concertos

• The score of Your Name. (Kimi no Na wa), in particular the song Goshintai.

• The ingenious musical Hadestown.

Some book recommendations

Basically since I've learned how to read, I love immersing myself in books. Here's an unstructured overview over some books that I've enjoyed (or hope to enjoy soon):

• The wonderfully creative and lyrical fantasy series The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss

• Rick Riordan's modern takes on Egyptian, Greek and Norse mythology

• The touching narration of an improbable friendship The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa

• Simon Singh's book entitled Fermat's Last Theorem, which is at least partially responsible for why I wanted to become a mathematician

• The timeless and intimate classic A Mathematician's Apology by G. H. Hardy

•  Some biographies of interesting people

  • Ein Aufleuchtender Blitz: Niels Henrik Abel Und Seine Zeit by Arild Stubhaug. (Thanks a lot to the Hurwitz Society who awarded me this book for the occasion of my Master's degree.)

  • Open by Andre Agassi

  • Marc Aurel: Der Kaiser und seine Welt by Alexander Demandt

  • Cicero: The Philosophy of a Roman Sceptic by Raphael Woolf

  • The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo

  • Albert Einstein. Eine Biographie by Albrecht Fölsing

  • The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth by Paul Hoffman

  • The Master: The Brilliant Career of Roger Federer by Christopher Clarey

  • Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

  • Wen die Götter lieben: Die Geschichte des Évariste Galois by Leopold Infeld

  • Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics by George Johnson

  • Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel by Stephen Budiansky

  • Alexandre Grothendieck: A Mathematical Portrait edited by Leila Schneps (which I still want to read)

  • I Want to Be a Mathematician: An Automathography by Paul R. Halmos

  • Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, and The Bomb by David C. Cassidy

  • Hilbert by Constance Reid

  • A Russian Childhood by Sofya Kovalevskaya (which I still want to read)

  • Emmy Noether: 1882-1935 by Auguste Dick

  • Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers by Cheryl Misak

  • Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics by John Derbyshire

  • Julia: A Life in Mathematics by Constance Reid (which I still want to read)

  • Pete Sampras: Greatness Revisited by Steve Flink

  • Schrödinger: Life and Thought by Walter J. Moore

  • A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman

  • Alan Turing. The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

  • The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician by André Weil (which I still want to read)

  • Mathematik. Mein Leben by Norbert Wiener

  • Women of Mathematics: A Bio-Bibliographic Sourcebook edited by Paul J. Campbell and Louise S. Grinstein