Welcome! My name is Oak. Well, technically, my name is ‘Oak Hu’ (a five-letter string), while I’m Oak Hu (the person to whom ‘Oak Hu’ refers); but it’s almost always fine to be sloppy.

My parents named me ‘Oak’ after Oklahoma State University, where they went for graduate school.

My last name, ‘Hu’, is from the Chinese 胡; appending 说 (‘speak’) yields 胡说 (‘nonsense’)—naturally, someone named ‘Oak Hu’ does philosophy.

I do mathematics and philosophy—the two armchair disciplines—at Magdalen College, Oxford. My main interests are in the areas of philosophy where you find λ-terms: the formal semantics of natural language, and the application of higher-order logic to metaphysics.

This site hosts some personal writing and tutorial essays, but you’ll probably be more interested in the work posted on my Substack.

The wallpaper is adapted from an photograph taken while visiting Wuzhen (乌镇), China, in August 2025. Since then, I’ve left the UK for Hostačov, Czechia (a rationality camp reunion) and New York City, USA (a philosophy conference).

This site was set up with substantial help from Gemini and Claude. My email address is the concatenation of my first name, a period, my last name, and the string ‘@magd.ox.ac.uk’.