Hi! I’m Dodam, a 27-year old Korean-American mathematician (Princeton A.B., Rutgers M.S.). I am currently preparing to bikepack around the world for a year starting late 2019, starting with Texas-Argentina. I value learning, openness, abstraction, exploration, spontaneity, and fluid intelligence.

I decided to start this blog after being encouraged by one of the friends I value the most in the world (Alex K. Chen), and a few others.

Always looking for travel buddies / ideas / suggestions, or generally thoughtful and interesting people! You can reach me using the e-mail link at the bottom, or reach out to me on Facebook (preferred). If you’re wondering whether we’ll get along, here are two short-ish Facebook posts that I think captures me fairly accurately: on meeting high-openness, high-Intelligence people, and my favourite song and having been suicidal.

What’s this blog about?

A little of everything I suppose — I have a really wide variety of interests including history, philosophy, engineering, neuroscience, medicine, sociology, literature, and so forth, so I’ll post about whatever I’m thinking about.

But at least for the foreseeable future, it’ll mostly be a bikepacking blog where I write my thoughts down so I don’t feel lonely since I love intense conversations and know I’ll miss them greatly.

(Side note: I use British spellings and punctuations because I learned English as a second language in Canada. I’m sorry if you get offended by periods outside quotation marks or how I spell “travelling”. I’m less sorry that I use metric.)

What’s with the name of your blog?

It’s a quadruple entendre – the branch of mathematics I studied is called category theory, which is roughly a way of making sense of modern mathematics in a content-free way by taking a step back and studying the underlying structures and their relations (and the relations between the relations, ad infinitum). The keywords in category theory are abstraction and generalization, and category theorists (including me) have a tendency to categorize everything — that is to say, try to shoehorn everything into a categorical framework even when it doesn’t make sense to do so.

On the other hand, beyond categorization (Hors catégorie, often shortened to ‘HC’) is also a cycling term — it refers to the hardest climbs in a road race, originally reserved for roads that cars were not expected to be able to pass. Since I love climbing tough mountains and am going to be encountering many, many HC climbs around the world, the name seemed fitting.

And then there’s the intended content of this blog: I really, really love translational thinking and weird ways of connecting the dots, so I hope to be able to write posts that can’t easily be categorized into neat boxes that are still coherent.

Finally, there’s the person that’s me — I’m off the charts on many personality metrics (both for better and worse), so yeah.

The story so far: I’ve been. . .

  • Living on the other side of the world from all of my family since I was 14
  • Having the first approved therapy animal on campus as a Princeton undergraduate
  • Riding in the back of a truck across rural Malawi as the stars come up after a hard week volunteering as a scrub nurse / optometrist
  • Getting on German radio in Frankfurt am Main as a traveler strangely obsessed with German history and literature
  • Climbing a 2200m volcano on a bike in the Canary Islands
  • Taking detours through streets of Dublin on an unplanned layover
  • Crashing a birthday party in Yerevan
  • Walking up a mountain by the moonlight in Tbilisi
  • Getting lost in Moscow and confusing strangers by smiling at them
  • Bikepacking across Morocco and camping on cliffs by the side of the road in the snow with a broken bike
  • Seeing a shooting star in all of these places and wondering if it was a satellite flare

The said therapy animal, named after a theological concept.