probability, statistics, metric spaces, Markov chains, freedom (social & academic), Israel, Jew stuff. opinions represent my employer & all other groups I'm in
Grigori Perelman, mathematician who proved the Poincaré Conjecture and who refused to accept a Fields Medal and the $1,000,000 Clay Prize, spotted at a traffic signal.
I feel silly tweeting this, but it's so damn useful, esp if you hadn't seen it:
max(x,y) + min(x,y) = x+y
max(x,y) - min(x,y) = |x-y|
hence:
2max(x,y) = x+y+|x-y|
and
2min(x,y) = x+y-|x-y|
This holds for all real numbers x,y.
Lebanon used to be majority Christian; any guess as to why it's not any longer?
with all the atrocities committed against the Christinas in the Muslim world, Tucker chose the one ME state where they're free from persecution
I can't believe I used to respect this man
Ep. 91 How does the government of Israel treat Christians? In the West, Christian leaders don’t seem interested in knowing the answer. They should be. Here’s the view of a pastor from Bethlehem.
Math and science are cumulative. We keep discovering new stuff, and almost never entirely forget the old.
Social policy is cyclical. We forget old, millennia-tested wisdom, let thgs get really bad, and then grope in the dark to eventually rediscovr what was already knwn eons ago
I used to be a libertarian but now am not. I still very much like freedom. What’s changed? I’ve gained the following insight: Individual freedom within a group is contingent upon careful vetting of new members.
🚨BREAKING: A woman gets arrested for removing squatters out of her $1,000,000 house in Queens, NY.
Adel Andaloro inherited her family's home in Flushing, Queens after her parents passed away and was in the process of selling it when she noticed that someone illegally moved in.…
I've always said that in Linear Algebra, there are no surprises: whatever you think ought to be true usually is.
So: who's going to show me up by pulling out some Surprising Facts about linear algebra?
#BREAKINGNEWS
: University President Claudine Gay will remain in office with the support of the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — according to a source familiar with the decision.
@mherszenhorn
&
@claireyuan33
report.
To my fellow Jews in the academia.
I told you so.
Not about Hamas (though that too).
But rather, about our far left colleagues.
Yes, they actually, literally want us dead.
Sometimes it's no fun being right.
So now what?
Let's come together and think.
"When we read the writings of Soviet dissidents and exiles, we are struck by one recurrent theme: their amazement,indignation and anger in the face of the stupidity,ignorance and indifference of Western opinion and especially of the Western intelligentsia"
@DialecticBio
This first-principled reasoning is flawed. The brain is an energetically expensive organ. Large cranium size causes complications in birth. So higher intelligence is not an unalloyed advantage: there are trade offs. One can imagine environs where it’s more advantageous or less.
Any Jewish researcher affiliated with Harvard who is interested in making aliyah, get in touch. I will personally help you navigate the Israeli academic market. Not limited to Harvard
I’ve already told my children (years ago) none of them are doing undergrad in the US, incl ofc the ivies. I’ve never given money to a university. What else can I do? Boycott Harvard?
Russian joke that anticipated all of Seinfeld:
Wife: “The Jones’s invited us over. Wanna go?”
Him: “No, I hate the Jones’s”
Her: “They hate us too. Imagine how glad they’ll be we didn’t come.”
Him: “You’re right. We’re going.”
I love these low-mid-high brow memes. So many of them are spot on. The general theme being that some insight is intuited by the hoi polloi, beaten out in college and grad school, and then reacquired by those who are no longer intimidated by credentials.
If you scratch someone accusing Israel of war crimes hard enough, eventually you’ll discover that he doesn’t think Israel should exist in the first place.
Not a psychologist, so this is 100% amateur bloviating. I suspect that some people attain some sort of frisson at saying obvious, blatant untruths and either forcing others to repeat them or watching them squirm and go out of their way to avoid getting near radioactive topics.
Yitang Zhang's long-awaited paper is out. Can't claim to understand it, but will steal the idea of substituting [current year] for [large constant I'm not able to optimize].
All college-age American Jews should consider getting a BA in Israel. You'll learn real skills minus the DEI struggle sessions, at a fraction of the cost. My university offers English programs as well. DMs open!
It took me till my 6th kid to realize: when a toddler is peppering you with questions, chances are he doesn't actually have a burning need to know something. He just wants your attention and to spend time with you.
When she says she wants Israel to "go away" she doesn't quite mean that, does she.
She presumably wants to retain the clean water, sanitation, electricity we provide. The access to world-class medicine and proximity to world-class technology.
This is the tragedy of Palestinian
Paul Graham has blocked me for saying that part of Hamas's strategy is explicitly to maximize civilian casualties on its side and weaponize people like him in their defense.
Where one's sympathies fall on the Israel-Palestine conflict is somewhat correlated with other political
if I killed your family and then hid among my children, what would you do?
being surrounded by one’s children does not grant a terrorist immunity
if your justice meter is broken, try to think of the game-theoretic incentives
machine learning is much easier to learn and usefully contribute to than many other fields of science. the theory doesn’t go super deep and understanding is mostly intuitive & empirical. moreover the intuitions change every few years so you’re not very far behind the top experts
@rogtron
Theory is almost always playing catch-up to empirically successful algorithms. This was certainly the case with regression, Nearest Neighbor, SVM, random forest.
CMU, where I got my PhD in 2007, is now requiring all first-year PhD students to undergo mandatory CRT indoctrination.
What would be a good way to oppose this?
Stop giving them money? (You have to start first.)
ideas welcome!
@PengzhouW
The jaggedy curve *does* approach the perfect circle curve, pointwise. But curve lengths don't necessarily behave well under pointwise convergence.
@RufusTFireflyJr
@wajacobson
von Neumann was a famous dandy. He had plenty of brain space left for fine clothes, top-shelf liquor, and chasing women. Very few von Neumanns out there, tbf...
I was an intern at bell labs when this paper was in the final stages of being published
I was privy to discussions on how to respond to referees (learned the word kurtosis)
had no idea I was witnessing history being made
As usual, an interesting and informative post by
@robkhenderson
Here's a nugget of profound wisdom from there, due to Donald Kingsbury:
“Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems.”
I have a nephew that I solve math olympiad problems with (at a leisurely, non-olympic pace)
sms from him "So, have you had a chance to make progress on that problem?.."
he'll make a fine mathematician
Some non-trivial portion of scientific progress proceeds by nudging your colleague with "So, any progress on that problem?.."
Don't be shy about nudging.
Oh and the nudgees? Take a minute to reply. Even if it's "Haven't had time" or "No longer interested". Both are good to know
@Indian_Bronson
the debasement of voluntarily going on these Jerry-Springer-type shows already kinda dwarfs whatever additional debasement is revealed during the show
1/Advice I reglrly give to my 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐨𝐫𝐲 students: Code it up! I got tremendous insight into automat thry by taking the time, in 1st yr grad school, to code up the basic conversions: NFA->DFA->regexp. Not coincidentally, that was when I wrote my first 📝
People everywhere need to understand that Israel is the canary in the mine of the civilized world. Don't think for one second that Hamas, Hizbulla & co will stop at just the Jews. They're coming for all of you. They're saying as much, very clearly. Pressure your gov'ts to act.
The deep and amazing thing about complex numbers is that adjoining sqrt(-1) to the real field lets you solve *all* of the polynomial equations, not just the "original"
x²=-1
you had set out to solve.
It's quite bemusing to see these political science types constantly talk about how smart they and those in their clique are. STEM people generally don't do that.
@srchvrs
I think the easiest way to see it is that pointwise convergence of f says nothing about convergence of f'.
Take f to be the area and f' to be the curve you're integrating.
Of course, we can have infinite length enclosing finite area (e.g., Koch) which is even "worse" than π=4
@aryehazan
My favourite on functional analysis
1. Kolmogorov and Fomin
2. Georgi Shilov (elements of functional analysis)
3. Vitali milman
4. Linear functional analysis by Joan Cerda (the best along with Robinson in Linear fxn analysis)
And following. Edwards & Shilov are my love.
So this paper was rejected from STOC before being accepted to
#COLT2023
. The reviews were mostly favorable, but in each case one referee wondered if the techniques weren't "standard" and proofs "straightforward".
To this referee -- and to the world -- we
@RichardHanania
No but fair and equal enforcement of the law lies at the very foundation of a just, civilized society. Selective enforcement == tyranny.
I'm not a biologist, nor an MD -- just a first principles guy (where applies)
isn't the fact that AIDS is essentially under control through drugs that combat the HIV virus very strong evidence for the HIV causal mechanism of AIDS?
Nice of Bret to use his appearance in front of millions of listeners on Rogan today to talk about how he is now an HIV/AIDS denialist. He finds the evidence that AIDS is not caused by HIV but by the gay lifestyle to be "surprisingly compelling."
There's no mystery at all about the Left's hatred of Israel: they want to dismantle all of western civ, so 🇮🇱 is a natural place to start.
It's the anti-🇮🇱 Right that I wonder about. Suppose 🇮🇱 is gone. You'll still have an Iran problem. You'll still have a Houthi problem. Hell,
I don't have an intuitive explanation of why 1/n diverges while 1/n² converges. Both have easy and intuitive proofs, but you do actually need to write down some formulas and analyze their behavior. Some things in math are like that, sorry.
@ElonBachman
It gets compressed from conscious to subconscious, from explicit to implicit. It all gets remembered and will come up at unexpected times and in unexpected ways.
very pleased to report that 2 papers out of my group have been accepted to
#COLT2023
:
1. paper with
@IdanAttias
(I'm not a co-author, congrats to Idan and the rest)
2. paper with Doron Cohen, "Local Glivenko-Cantelli"
excellent work guys, 🍾
I've been told by some people that I'm being shadow-banned. People who follow me tell me they see my posts like once a month. Request: If you follow me (and ONLY if you do), please like this tweet.