Introducing OEMI: The Online Encyclopedia for Mathematical Identities

For those who know me, this will not come as a surprise: I have always had a distinct fascination with mathematics. Not just the abstract conversation around it, but the thing itself—the rigorous, demanding, often beautiful discipline of actually solving problems. I spend free time working through proofs, chasing identities, watching other people approach the same question from entirely different angles, and appreciating the strange elegance of seeing one truth revealed through many paths. If you have followed me for long enough, you will probably already know the pattern. You can see it in the problems I post, in the things I save, in the way I drift toward channels like Michael Penn, 3Blue1Brown, blackpenredpen, Flammable Maths, Dr Peyam, Physics Explained, and even the long archives of MIT OpenCourseWare. Mathematics, much like programming, has always been one of the few constants in my world. Both have given me a kind of peace that is difficult to explain unless you have felt it yourself: a meditative consolidation of memory, logic, and thought. Without them, I suspect I would be far more lost.

But over the years, I kept running into the same problem. Finding mathematical identities—and more importantly, finding them in a form that is actually useful—was far harder than it should have been. If you need a quick overview of a topic, Wikipedia is often enough. If you need a theorem stated cleanly, maybe a textbook or a paper will help. But if you are looking for a specific identity, a derivation, an alternative form, a precise notation, a source, or even just a clean way to copy it into something you are building or writing, the search becomes fractured. The knowledge exists, but it is scattered. You find one fragment in a forum post, another in lecture notes, another in a PDF, another buried in a video, and too often the thing you need is technically available but practically inaccessible.

That gap stayed with me, and a few years ago, after watching one of Michael Penn’s videos, it pushed me to create something I called OEMI: the Online Encyclopedia for Mathematical Identities. The original version was built on Wiki.js, and while I was glad it existed at all, the project never became what I wanted it to be. Part of that was timing, part of it was execution, and part of it was simply the reality of building on top of a foundation that was never designed for the shape I had in mind. The structure felt limited. The customisation was constrained. The architecture made growth feel awkward rather than natural. It worked, but it did not feel like a system that could truly evolve.

Since then, a great deal has changed on my side. My understanding of TypeScript, React, and Next.js has grown significantly, and with that growth came a stronger sense of how this project should actually be built. Some ideas deserve a second attempt, not because the first was worthless, but because the original form was only a sketch of what they were meant to become. OEMI was one of those ideas. It deserved better. It deserved a proper foundation, a scalable architecture, and a design that treats mathematical knowledge not as static text on a page, but as structured, usable, shareable information.

So today, I am introducing the new OEMI by Valeon.

This rebuilt version is not just a revival of an old project. It is the version I always wanted to make. It has been designed with growth in mind, both technically and communally. Identities can be presented with proper LaTeX and MathML support, with JSON object views where structure matters, and with a focus on exportability so that what you find is not trapped on the page. Entries are built to be copied, shared, referenced, and reused. Beyond the identity itself, there is room for derivations, source links, embedded videos, and the surrounding context that turns a formula from a line of symbols into something understood. More importantly, the platform is being built to support user submissions and community editors, so that this does not remain a private archive dressed as a public service, but can become a living, reviewed, growing body of work.

In many ways, OEMI sits exactly where my interests have always converged. It is mathematics, but it is also structure. It is knowledge, but also systems design. It is the quiet satisfaction of solving problems, translated into a platform that I hope makes that process more accessible for others. Not just a place to read, but a place to search properly, to learn properly, and to find the thing you need without having to reconstruct it from fragments across the internet.

Some projects are built because they seem commercially obvious. Others are built because they solve a problem you personally cannot stop noticing. OEMI belongs to the second category. I wanted a place where mathematical identities could be treated with the clarity, rigour, and usability they deserve. I wanted something more intentional than a wiki page, more structured than a note dump, and more durable than a bookmark folder full of disconnected sources. And now, finally, I have been able to build it in a way that feels worthy of the idea.

OEMI by Valeon is, at its heart, an attempt to close a gap I have felt for years. A small act of order in a space that has too often been left unnecessarily scattered. And for those of us who find peace in the language of mathematics, sometimes that kind of order is more than useful. Sometimes it is exactly the point.