Aryeh Kontorovich Profile
Aryeh Kontorovich

@aryehazan

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probability, statistics, metric spaces, Markov chains, freedom (social & academic), Israel, Jew stuff. opinions represent my employer & all other groups I'm in

Joined August 2010
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
4 years
@lreyzin I replace exact expressions by approximations that either never exceed or never deceed the original.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
5 months
classic entry in the "math prof or hobo" series
@PhysInHistory
Physics In History
5 months
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.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
I had this hanging on my office door for a couple of years. A nice illustration of how limits do/don't work.
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Aryeh Kontorovich
11 months
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.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 month
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
@TuckerCarlson
Tucker Carlson
1 month
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.
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Aryeh Kontorovich
30 days
Jews without a state: rootless cosmopolitans Jews with a state: settler colonialists
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
2 months
good one to stump students just learning about induction (h/t @JDHamkins )
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
6 months
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
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
6 months
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.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 month
🄽🄾🄽-🄼🄰🅃🄷 🄿🄴🄾🄿🄻🄴 🄾🄽🄻🅈 where's the mistake in this argument?
@VinceVatter
Vince Vatter
2 months
big, if true
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
7 months
There comes a time when a man must pick up arms to defend his country. Math will have to wait.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
2 months
one of the tell-tale signs of a failed state is failure to protect private property liberty and life are always next
@ImMeme0
I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸
2 months
🚨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.…
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
8 months
lol
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
7 months
Dear friends, My immediate family is ok. Beyond that—very much not ok. May we overcome the enemy soon.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
2 months
oh, and this is what a high-dimensional *convex* set looks like you read that right, CONVEX
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@mariotelfig
Mario Figueiredo
2 months
My favorite illustration of how geometric intuition fails miserably in high dimensions.
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Aryeh Kontorovich
6 months
this is the king of Jordan
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@Kyla_Lacey
Kyla Jenée Lacey
6 months
It’s wild watching Zionists with blue eyes and blonde hair talk about how a country in the Middle East is their rightful homeland.
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Aryeh Kontorovich
7 months
it took the wokeness movement about 4 years to go from "respect my pronouns" to "exterminate the Jews"
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
8 months
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
8 months
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?
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
5 months
as a show of power, she should give a plagiarized victory speech
@thecrimson
The Harvard Crimson
5 months
#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.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
11 days
@pli_cachete go at 1am it's surreal
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
6 months
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.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
2 months
I can attest firsthand to that special contempt that those who’ve actually lived under communism reserve for western intellectuals.
@robkhenderson
Rob Henderson
2 months
"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"
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
2 months
“I want to dismantle all ethnostates. Let’s start with the Jewish one.”
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
7 months
arright fellas you got 5 min for office hours
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
@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.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
2 months
your regular reminder that conditional probability pays mind tricks on you (links below)
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
5 months
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
@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
5 months
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?
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
7 days
I don’t want a specific antisemitism bill just enforce current laws do so efficiently, effectively, uniformly, and fairly that is all
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
11 months
This gives a 1-line proof of the identity ∑|p(x)-q(x)| = 1-∑min{p(x),q(x)} for distributions p(x), q(x)
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
7 months
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.”
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
7 months
And there it is. Those announcements I've been dreading are starting to drip in. People from the university, students from my department.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
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.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 month
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 month
prediction: the more Israel wins, the better-liked we'll be worldwide especially by our Arab neighbors
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 month
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.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
from The Joy of Abstraction: An Exploration of Math, Category Theory, and Life New Edition by Eugenia Cheng, posting without comment
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
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.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
7 months
Well-meaning friends are asking me if I'm going to move my family to the US. No. It's Israel or bust.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
2 years
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].
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
6 months
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!
@dvir_a
Dvir Aran
6 months
Suffering from the growing antisemitism at your university? We invite you to pursue your research and studies at the @TechnionLive
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
2 years
Use the word “matrix” in a way that one can’t tell if it’s the movie or the linear operator.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
9 months
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.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
10 months
My Adult moment as a researcher arrived when I was stuck, wanted to ask someone, and realized that There. Is. No. One. To. Ask
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
5 months
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
@elikowaz
Eli Kowaz - איליי קואז
5 months
What does "Free Palestine" mean to a secular, well-educated woman in Ramallah? The destruction of Israel.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
7 months
father and son, each giving what he can
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Aryeh Kontorovich
9 months
The problem with democracy isn’t that idiots get to vote. It’s that people without long-term skin in the game do.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 month
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
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
@Steve_Sailer @kareem_carr Hey, a different statistician here. If I say it’s not pseudoscience do we cancel each other?
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 month
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
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
8 months
"the theory doesn’t go super deep" who wants to tell him
@tszzl
roon
8 months
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
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Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
-OK class, this semester we'll be decolonizing linear algebra. -Um, could we maybe learn some linear algebra first?
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
2 months
@ptrschmdtnlsn @JDHamkins the astute student should notice right away that the false proof also holds for the sum 1+2+3+4+...
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
8 months
In fact, as a challenge, name an empirically successful algorithm that arose from theory. All I got is boosting.
@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
8 months
@rogtron Theory is almost always playing catch-up to empirically successful algorithms. This was certainly the case with regression, Nearest Neighbor, SVM, random forest.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
7 months
equipment upgrade
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
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!
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
7 months
Defending my beloved city is the easy part. The hard part is visiting a murdered student’s family.
@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
7 months
equipment upgrade
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
7 months
some students recognize me and started asking cs questions. That’s for coffee break
@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
7 months
equipment upgrade
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
@PengzhouW The jaggedy curve *does* approach the perfect circle curve, pointwise. But curve lengths don't necessarily behave well under pointwise convergence.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
5 months
@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...
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Aryeh Kontorovich
1 month
moral of story: addition over the reals is finitely, but not countably, associative
@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 month
🄽🄾🄽-🄼🄰🅃🄷 🄿🄴🄾🄿🄻🄴 🄾🄽🄻🅈 where's the mistake in this argument?
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
@JohnDSailer "We had to cancel your event due to threats of violence." "Violence by whom?" "Violence by us."
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
2 months
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
@gabrielpeyre
Gabriel Peyré
2 months
Lee and Seung algorithm is the most popular matrix factorization algorithm, which operates by multiplicative updates.
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Aryeh Kontorovich
6 months
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.”
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
10 days
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
@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
30 days
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
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Aryeh Kontorovich
2 years
Student: "Wow, this paper is definitely getting in!" Me: "Uh, let's work on making rejecting it maximally difficult."
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
5 months
@Indian_Bronson the debasement of voluntarily going on these Jerry-Springer-type shows already kinda dwarfs whatever additional debasement is revealed during the show
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
Referee: Was this paper written by GPT? Rebuttal: Was the review written by GPT?
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
11 months
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 📝
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
7 months
This is not a religious, ethnic, or territorial conflict. This is civilization vs. barbarism, plain and simple.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
7 months
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.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
4 months
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.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
6 months
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.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
2 months
savvy Soviet citizens learned to glean bits of reliable information from the Pravda I nominate @Steve_Sailer as the savviest NYT reader
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
@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
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
11 months
I thought I'd understood it well, but Sokal's FA course was chalk-full of novel insights -- not to mention that his notes read like a suspense novel.
@Golovanov_ammoc
Yaashaa P. Golovanov
11 months
@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.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
5 months
better education than in the US at a fraction of the price I’m an Israeli professor DM if you want details
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
7 months
Very difficult to watch. But the world must know.
@MarinaMedvin
Marina Medvin 🇺🇸
7 months
Thread of videos showing Palestinian cruelties to Israeli civilians on Oct 7, 2023.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
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
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
10 months
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
4 years
@thegautamkamath They actually did— in Russian, v comes before ch.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
@kfountou @HoldijkLars Yes, exactly this
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Aryeh Kontorovich
3 months
moral of story: you can't entirely do away with memorizing *some* basic facts
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
2 months
@Indian_Bronson we've been sold short many times before long odds are on the Jews won't be easy, I agree
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
5 months
@kahntra @dontcallSaulz odds are not a Jew
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
I keep seeing critiques of the “VC culture”. Geesh, folks, I know that PAC learning is old and broke but you don’t need to keep punching down…
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
3 months
I love tautologies because they're tautological
@Maximumatheist
Maximum atheist
3 months
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
@RichardHanania No but fair and equal enforcement of the law lies at the very foundation of a just, civilized society. Selective enforcement == tyranny.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
time for another viral tweet?
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
3 months
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?
@thebadstats
bad_stats 🕜💵🖨️🕣
3 months
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."
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
6 months
Hamas is the most honest partner for peace we’ve ever had.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
3 months
@Nayborhoodbully How do we know these bikes 🚲 weren’t stolen from Israel?
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
29 days
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,
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
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.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
10 months
@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.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
1 year
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, 🍾
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
2 years
@ScottAdamsSays No worries. They'll be investigated by... the FBI?..
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
2 years
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.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
10 months
Your grade in this cryptography course will be 0 by default. To pass the course, you must figure out how to change it yourself.
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@aryehazan
Aryeh Kontorovich
3 months
@nathancofnas I do so hope that you get on will’s radar and he has another meltdown.
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