Obtuse Coffee (钝角咖啡)

During my Ph.D. at Peking University, I worked as a barista and served as the “founding accountant” of Obtuse Coffee (钝角咖啡), a student-founded and student-operated café at the School of Mathematical Sciences. Looking back, it was probably my first hands-on attempt to combine financial knowledge with inventory management, except that the inventory consisted mostly of coffee beans and milk.

The café was created to provide affordable, convenient, and genuinely good coffee to students and faculty. It offered a comfortable place to pause, relax, and talk between seminars, problem sets, and long stretches of thinking. For many students, Obtuse Coffee became a small anchor in everyday life. It witnessed both the frustration of being stuck on a difficult problem and more than a few “Aha!” moments. A familiar invitation around the building was:

“走，去钝角整杯咖啡！(Let’s go grab a coffee at Obtuse!)”