About

Aleph-One (ℵ₁) is the consulting practice of Steven Davey, based in Plettenberg Bay. The work is online.

The name is the first uncountable cardinal, and a nod to the fact I still find most remarkable in mathematics: not all infinities are the same size. The rational numbers are infinite, and dense — between any two of them lies another — yet they are so completely outnumbered by the real numbers that they take up no length at all. Choose a point at random on the line and you will miss every one of them. Then consider that every computer, and every neural network, works entirely inside that vanishing set — inside a finite handful of it, in fact. Whatever they achieve, they achieve without ever touching almost any number that exists.

Abundance and significance are not the same thing. That is worth remembering well beyond mathematics, and not least in what is currently sold as artificial intelligence.

I trained as a mathematician and have spent twenty-five years in financial services — banking, insurance and fintech. Most of that work has been quantitative, which sits close enough to technology that I have developed a deep appreciation for the tools we use, and for the ones we could be using. I left my last formal role in 2023 to start this practice.

The work now is to take ideas that are still a bit too abstract — a regulatory document, a modelling approach, a generative-AI capability — and turn them into algorithms that a team can run, inspect and own.