Noah Stephens-Davidowitz

@ml_fest_at Yeah. I comment on that in the post. It makes sense technically, but 1) more-or-less any mathematical notation is formally equivalent to some kind of set membership; that doesn't mean we should write it as such; and 2) this hasn't caught on because it doesn't match our intuition.

@NoahSD some books use element notation $\in$ e.g. f(n) \in O(n) means f(n) has a linear asymptotic so the O's notations can be seen as sets

I wrote up a little blog post proposing a slightly different way to write asymptotic notation. solipsistslog.com/a-simple-and-m… In short, I think asymptotic notation should often be written with an INequality. E.g., f(n) <= O(n^2), f(n) < o(log n), f(n) > 2^{-o(n)}, f(n) >= n^{-O(1)}.

I know that this is not an original idea. It seems that many authors use this notation already, at least in some contexts. I have not seen anyone advocate for its widespread adoption, so I thought I would.

And, using these conventions means that authors must think a bit about what they actually mean when they use asymptotic notation, which is a good thing.

Left: Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin dismisses Jan. 6 case of Jose Padilla on Jan. 21, 2025 Right: Interim US Attorney Ed Martin seeks to withdraw as Padilla’s counsel of record on Feb. 5, 2025 He signed a dismissal for a client he was still recorded as representing.

Happy Birthday Ramanujan 🥳

Almost three years later, I found a proof that I really like and wrote it up formally: noahsd.com/exponential_is… .

Dumb question that's bugging me: What's a really nice clean proof that 2^n grows faster than any polynomial? (Clean is obviously ill-defined here, but I mean short, intuitive, and using as little fancy math as possible.)

A look back at The Future of Publishing: A festival in New York City. @SethS_D discusses writing a book in 30 days with the help of AI.

Congratulations to @Eshan_chattopad and David Zuckerman on winning the Held Prize! For their groundbreaking work on randomness extraction.

Day 1 of professing at CU Boulder.

A great preprint appeared on arXiv this morning by Marcelo Campos, Marcus Michelen, Julian Sahasrabudhe and Matthew Jensen -- the first improvement by more than a constant factor to the lower bound for sphere packing in large dimensions since 1947. 1/10 arxiv.org/abs/2312.10026

First review of Who Makes the NBA, from one of my heroes @tylercowen, who says "It's quite good!" and "I really liked this book." #comments" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…

My new book, Who Makes the NBA, is out today!!!! This is one of my favorite charts from the book: the advantage fathers pass to their sons in various fields. I expanded it based on twitter comments. bit.ly/41f0JBy

My 3rd favorite chart from Who Makes the NBA (out today!!!) amazon.com/Who-Makes-NBA-…

DAY 3 OF MY CHALLENGE TO WRITE A (GOOD) BOOK ON THE NBA IN 30 DAYS, THANKS TO AI's DATA ANALYSIS TOOLS. Have you ever wondered: Who would be the best basketball player of all time if everybody were the same height? 🧵

Amazing: Zeyong Li showed that the complexity class S_2 E requires near-maximum circuit size on 𝐚𝐥𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 input length, as well as a "genuine" (no infty often caveats) pseudodeterministic ZPP^NP algorithm for range avoidance! eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2023/15… (1/4)