Academia & research
A book club for the most intimidating subjects
Avni Jain, a mathematics student at Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi, has run avnijain.in since she was 13 and is now planning a weekly book club that breaks difficult subjects down for anyone who wants to learn them.
The website holds 90+ book reviews, interviews and a newsletter. Avni Jain started it at 13, "willing to try and learn everything," she says, and it grew into avnijain.in.
Before that, at 10, she was watching neurosurgery explainer videos, "convinced I wanted to be a doctor, just unsure which field," she says. She eventually chose mathematics. She kept wanting to learn about other things, and she has watched her humanities peers struggle to learn AI. "University taught me learning should never stop and shouldn't have barriers. But academic terminology and appendices make that hard."
“Knowledge shouldn’t need a password, the right degree, or the right school.”
Avni Jain
Her next project is a book club. Instead of writing about books for people who already read, she wants "a space where inquisitive people, regardless of background, learn together."
"It's still just me and a notebook, but here's the plan," she says. Each week, one topic, step by step. Every piece will come with an appendix decoding academic terms and a syllabus to the source material. As a technical researcher she is also building a weekly AI section, "harm-aware, not hype-driven." Once there is a community, she wants to open it up to contributors writing in their own areas.
She is a mathematics student who also works as a researcher and a journalist. She has run a university-level mathematics newsletter for a predominantly humanities college, organised community events for poets, and interviewed labour-market participants in New Delhi to examine women's workforce participation. She holds the DU 21 Under 21 title from India's largest student-led newspaper, for her contributions to literature, and she has worked with professors from Northwestern University, Imperial College London and Harvard Business School on economics research. She has also conducted a workshop on spoken word at IIT Delhi.
She has since received a 50% scholarship to present her research, "Mathematical Characterization of Accuracy Loss in Differentially Private ML Models," at the VII International Conference on Mathematics and Applied Sciences, to be held at Nagoya University, Japan.
"I've never believed in staying in one lane," she says.