Math
I am of course extremely fond of mathematics! I think that no worldview is complete without at least a passable understanding of mathematical reasoning. The origin of mathematics and its effectiveness in the natural sciences is somewhat of a miracle- or at least, as a good essay by physicist Eugene Wigner asserts.
I am currently teaching myself differential geometry/tensor calculus, which has been my holy grail-of-sorts since high school. My research includes dynamical structure functions (DSFs) and what equivalence classes of computational structures exist for a single input-output mapping (or equivalently, what structures can be learned uniquely from the input-output data), as well as opinion dynamics in stochastically time-varying social networks models.
Languages
I am an enthusiastic amateur linguist- I am absolutely fascinated with the ways that people think and express it through language. I have a particular itch for historical linguistics-don't ever get me started on this subject if you have somewhere to be. I speak Latin and Persian fluently, and French and German passably. My good friend Max Haddock and I have created a podcast about historical linguistics which you can listen to here! (link to come)
Music!
One of my longest and most passionate relationships has been with music. I have played piano for sixteen years and cello for ten- I got to play in the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra in high school, and served as a section leader in the BYU Symphony Orchestra. My favorite pieces of music include Brahms' 4th (well, actually, all of them) symphony, Schumann's cello concerto, Liszt's enigmatic Sonata, and Mahler's 3rd and 5th symphonies. Those dynastic pillars, pinnacles of musical and artistic achievement, have gotten me through a lot in my life. Writing this I see a similarity between all of my interests- there is something enigmatic, elusive, ethereally beautiful about math, music, and languages that seems to hold my attention. It's not easy to describe, and not all are equivalently so (I wouldn't go to a math problem to deal with a breakup, and I have never thought a piece of music would be improved by adding words) but they all exude a word that has haunted me for years now- "greatness"- that which is possessed of glory.