Aleksandar Liden

  • Nine Days with the Quintic

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    I’m thrilled to share my submission for the Summer of Math Exposition! This essay is a nine-day diary of rediscovering Arnold’s topological proof. Before the diary begins: this problem stumped mathematicians like Euler, Bézout, and Lagrange for more than 200 years, and when it was finally solved, the reason turned out to be stranger than…

  • Slow Steps

    I don’t demand anything. I have more than I need.I don’t search meaning, and find it everywhere.I don’t force. All my tasks get done. I don’t rush, and peace catches me up. My steps are slow.My plans are small.My actions are simple.My efforts are short.

  • The Necessities of Life

    Around 500 BCE the humans transitioned from Mythos to Logos. The greek philosopher Empedocles said that all matter is composed of these four elements: Earth, Water, Air and Fire. Most interpreters think that he choose those four elements because they think that they reflect the four states of matter: Solids, Liquids, Gases and Plasma. But…

  • The Ground State

    What I want is to enjoy this moment. Not a better moment. Not a different moment. Not a future moment. This one. Exactly as it is. The mind makes that hard. It was not built for peace. It was built to spot the snake. It scans. Predicts. Worries. Plans. It wants to use the moment,…

  • The Promenade

    The Cabo Roig promenade is two hundred meters from my townhouse. When I step onto it, I am twenty-five meters above the sea. I can hear the rhythmic “shhh… shhh…” of the water below. I hear the gulls cry and stop to look up. Three of them hang above the cliff edge without moving their…

  • Urban Hermit

    It’s just past six in the morning here in Spain. I’m sitting at my desk on the second floor in my townhouse, coffee in hand, looking at the screen. It’s completely quiet. I open the balcony door and I hear the birds. This is my favorite hour of the day. It won’t get better than…

  • Naxos

    My family and I had taken a holiday to Naxos, Greece. That first morning I stepped out of the rented apartment to find a grocery store, something for breakfast. It was already warm at nine in the morning. The air carried the salt-and-mineral smell of the sea mixed with something sweet—jasmine, maybe, or oleander blooming…

  • The Lake and the Loon

    When we moved to Sweden, we ended up in Nässjö — a small town nestled in the highlands of Småland. It was beautiful country: rolling hills, mirror-still lakes, forests that stretched further than you’d ever want to walk. In summer I was out fishing every week, and in winter skiing was a main occupation. Then…

  • The Invisible Editor

    There is a particular voice that AI defaults to when it touches your writing. It is confident, warm, and almost always wrong about what it’s confident about. It doesn’t announce itself as a bias. It arrives disguised as craft advice — the kind you’d hear in any MFA workshop, any editorial meeting, any “how to…

  • The Neverending AI

    In 1979, Michael Ende wrote a book about a boy named Bastian who disappears into a story to save a dying magical world. It’s a masterpiece of fantasy, but if you read it today through the lens of our age of AI, it feels like a prophecy. Swap Fantastica for AI. It’s not a stretch.…