Victor Miller

@alz_zyd_ Look at this for a good example of a coupling en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal_c…

I got a little bored of reading Rudin using Gemini, so I decided to try AI-reading something more fun: this beautiful paper by Yang^2. Unfortunately, while beautiful, it is also really hard (wtf is a coupling???), so I will need a lot of AI help

@SoosMate @veorq @mccurley In the days when proceedings were restricted to physical books there were hard page limits. This forced writers to be concise (which is hard work!).

@veorq @AlgebraVic @mccurley 100% agree. Somehow this very obtuse writing style became prevalent. Reviewers look for it and so the authors write it. Annoying and very confusing to most readers, even reviewers.

I don't normally post to X, but this is the distribution on the number of pages of papers submitted to crypto 2026. The average number of pages is 50. There were 752 papers, of which 22 have more than 100 pages. Peer review anyone?

@SoosMate @mccurley @veorq They’re writing a novel when they should be writing a short story. If I wanted to read “Ulysses” I read Joyce.

@mccurley @veorq Just say no. Ridiculous publish or perish nonsense is really not helping here. 100+ pages? Who’s gonna review that? Nope. AI can help you write 1000s of pages in a matter of days. That doesn’t make those pages worthwhile to read…

@__paleologo I always had to pay for lunch when I was there, 1978-1993, coffee was free though.

Another little story. Until the early 90s, IBM Research in Yorktown served free lunch. The chef was named Jean-Jacques. I recall Mandelbrot having lunch with his friends every day. Alan Hoffman, Charlie Bennett, and many other cool dudes were there, and you could just eat with them. Then, IBM had a major crisis. They laid off 40% of the workforce. They started charging for lunch every day except Monday. Then, they laid off Jean-Jacques and charged every day, but coffee was free. Then, coffee was free only Mondays. Still, Jean-Jacques catered at my wedding. We all knew each other, because we all ate together. Years after I left, I visited my old pals. I stopped by the cafeteria for coffee. As I was leaving, the server stopped me "You have to pay for coffee." and I: "But it's Monday!" and he: "They started charging last week." And that's when it dawned on me that IBM was really, deeply screwed.

@OldNorth1723 I was a professor at U Mass/Boston. I had finished all of my morning classes, and had office hours around noon. No one was coming in and the view out my window to Boston Harbor looked ominous, so I got on the T to go home to Cambridge. The howling winds outside were incredible.

It's snowing today in Boston, which is appropriate because February 7 is the anniversary of the Blizzard of '78. Ferocious winds created snow drifts as high as 15 feet tall. Over 3,500 vehicles were immobilized along an 8-mile stretch of Route 128.

@bostonradio I lived about 1/4 mile north of Harvard Square. I hiked down to there and saw the Saint Bernard with the cask :-). So I must have been there when the video was taken. The next day, because of the storm I got to meet Micael Dukakis.

Happy Blizzard of ‘78 Day if you’re observing it….

@RealWorldCrypto “Sympsium”?

Don’t miss the early registration deadline for Real World Crypto 2026 on February 6. rwc.iacr.org/2026/registrat…

@TerribleMaps Maybe he’s referring to this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_(sof…

Can someone explain this one to me please? I don't understan

@EsotericCD @OrinKerr He said that he could determine where in Philadelphia someone was from within about 10 blocks (!) by listening to them speak. 2/2

Only mentioning this because folks were randomly chatting earlier about U.S. pronunciation (blame @OrinKerr), but this remains the greatest "web-quiz" ever, positively uncanny in its results. It nailed where I was 1) born; 2) raised; 3) schooled. Try it. nytimes.com/interactive/20…

@EsotericCD @OrinKerr I was born in Brooklyn, but we moved around the NYC area through high school (which was in northern NJ). That was the reddist area for me). When I was in college I took a linguistics course. The young professor had recently finished his PhD at University of Pennsylvania. 1/2

@ergodictom @CoraCHarrington Here’s an amazing quote. “He will soon be disillusioned and be faced with a titanic struggle. He will require the patience of Job, the courage of Achilles, and the strength of Hercules to understand the proofs of some of the essential theorems.”

@ergodictom @CoraCHarrington Here’s a famous review by L. J. Mordell of Serge Lang’s Diophantine Geometry projecteuclid.org/journalArticle…

I’m working on my thesis and stumbled upon an ongoing scholarly beef complete with 17-page exchanged rebuttals in major journals, and in one of them, one academic called the other academic’s book “thin in size and substance,” and I gasped out loud. Can you imagine??

The indication of the unread message then disappears for a short time, but then comes back. This has been the case every since the other account has been deleted. 2/2

Someone with whom I've exchanged DMs with has decided to delete their account. Now, whenever I'm on X, both on the website, and on the app on my iPhone, I have an indication of an unread message. When I go to messages, there is none. 1/2

@RonSC51 @ThrillaRilla369 Arnold Stang was their spokesman youtu.be/I_xf-MPKLf0?si…

@ThrillaRilla369 Yep! "Open Wide for Chunky" . Still around.

I swear there used to be chocolate bars called CHUNKY! Does anyone else remember those thick little squares?

@minilek Compare a sum to an integral

Pet peeve: someone invoking Stirling's approximation to justify log(n!) = Theta(n log n).

@ChShersh That’s known as the “secretaries” problem en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary…

Quant interview question: You press a button that gives your randomly uniformly distributed number between $0 and $100K Each time you press, you have two choices: 1. Stop and take this amount of money 2. Try again You can try 10 times total. When do you stop?

@SuccinctLabs Link please.

4/ At the heart of SP1 Hypercube is a custom-built proof system that pushes the frontier of zkVM performance by leveraging multilinear polynomials and a new polynomial commitment scheme known as the Jagged PCS. Read our research paper:

Real-Time Ethereum Proving is here. INTRODUCING: SP1 Hypercube

@CptAllenHistory My grandfather was born in Jaffa in 1887 and left in 1905 because of anti Jewish riots by the Arabs. He always referred to himself as a Palestinian (he also spoke fluent Arabic).

Yes, everyone used to know that the word “Palestinian” referred to Jews in pre-state Israel. Like this clip from the 1960 movie Exodus where the term “Palestinian” is used … repeatedly … to refer to those Jews living in British Mandate Palestine. Nobody batted an eye.

@fermatslibrary Actually Alfred Renyi said that.

Paul Erdös was born exactly 112 years ago. "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems"