Gunaratne

Guy Gunaratne’s debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City, was set in the council estates and migrant enclaves of a London that few politicians acknowledge, and in the immediate aftermath of the 2013 killing of soldier Lee Rigby by two British-Nigerian converts to Islam. A literary La Haine, owing more to Wiley than to Peter Ackroyd, it presented the capital as noise: Lon‑din, a city contaminated by an imperial past, a place where “constant, punishing memories are left to spill into one another”.The follow-up, Mister,…

Guy Gunaratne is sipping lemon and ginger tea at the end of a larynx-taxing week recording the audiobook of their latest novel, Mister, Mister. The book is set partly in east London, where we’re meeting before they catch an evening flight home to their wife and two young children in Malmö, Sweden. For the author of 2018’s Booker-longlisted In Our Mad and Furious City (or Mad, as they handily call it), the zigzag itinerary has become a routine: the new book, initally sparked by the controversy surrounding Shamima Begum,…

Steepest descent on the Himmelblau function (self-generated-image)Building a visualizer to play around with different optimization algorithmsIn this article I am going to be displaying a visualization tool I created to understand how optimization algorithms work on 2D functions. I will provide a brief background about some of the math in the algorithms as well as delve into the implementation details from the visualizer tool.If you want to play around with the different optimization algorithms being run on different…