Kevin
2.1K posts
What do you call the gas pedal in an electric car? 😳
In our Tesla and the kids just asked me…
Yo, I’m stuck?!? 🤯🤣
English
@GBX_Press The comma that should be after “after” is not optional. Its absence changes the meaning. As written, you imply the partnership happened after the contract.
English
It's still baffling to me that you can make a length 2 zig-zag look arbitrarily close to a length sqrt(2) line without changing its own length at all
I know we can say "arc length isn't continuous wrt pointwise convergence", but that only renames the fact, it doesn't debaffle it
English
on the whole @arxiv flap about hallucinated references etc
you don't see the stuff we reject...
some of it is really really egregious
the decision to impose additional consequences is largely to throttle that stuff so n00bs and bad actors don't trash us trying repeatedly
English
@STARIKSU98 @RpsAgainstTrump When congress votes on Ukraine aid, it goes 70% in favor.
English
@RpsAgainstTrump Is there even the slightest chance this bill gains a simple majority, let alone two-thirds? Or are Republicans still afraid to speak their minds and still waiting for instructions from Trump?
English
JUST IN: House Democrats secured the 218 signatures needed to bypass Speaker Mike Johnson and force a vote on Russia sanctions and Ukraine aid after Rep. Kevin Kiley joined Republicans Brian Fitzpatrick and Don Bacon in backing the petition.
English
Because solving high school level problems very quickly is not the same as advancing math.
alz@alz_zyd_
France has more Fields medalists than any other country in Europe, but performs extremely poorly on the IMO. Countries like Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria do very well on the IMO, but don't have a single Fields medal. Why?
English
@davidbessis "height is gaussian" is a lie we tell students to motivate the gaussian distribution. Actual data fails Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, even if you try to control for gender & ethnicity.
English
Aryeh finally agrees that human talent can't be genetic, since it follows a power law. All highly heritable polygenic traits, like height, are Gaussian.
Aryeh Kontorovich@aryehazan
human talent follows a power law distribution it’s fractals all the way down (meaning: Ron also had a similar experience)
English
“AI threatening to put almost all mathematicians out of a job”
Typical example of substituting what you think will happen for what has actually happened.
It’s nonstop with AI.
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼@Noahpinion
In three years we went from AI being unable to do simple arithmetic to AI threatening to put almost all professional mathematicians out of a job. Pretty impressive!
English
@PietroMonticone @HarmonicMath @leanprover @mathNTb @arxiv You should speak on this somewhere. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe at 3pm. Maybe on Zoom. :)
English
Here's what András Sárközy, Erdős's most prolific collaborator, asked 25 years ago:
"How small can one make the maximal gap between the consecutive elements of a multiplicative Sidon set selected from {1, 2, ..., n}?"
In particular: does there exist a multiplicative Sidon set A ⊆ {1, 2, …, n} such that every sub-interval of [1, n] of length at least √n contains at least one element of A?
The answer is yes. The solution was autonomously discovered and formally verified in #Lean by Aristotle. We then improved the bound below √n and Aristotle formalised our proof too.
Română
Kevin retweetledi
It makes you wonder, what % of published math papers have errors in them? Could mathematics have its own reproducibility crisis?
Epoch AI@EpochAIResearch
We are conducting an AI-assisted review of FrontierMath: Tiers 1-4. This has flagged fatal errors in about a third of problems, and we believe most of these flags to be valid. We will release updated scores on a corrected dataset after completing a thorough human review.
English
@thomasfbloom 2/2: Very few of us do research on a level that will be prestigious in a super-competent AI world, and very few of us will even have access to the best AIs. And as for our utility as teachers, who will we be teaching?
English
@thomasfbloom 1/2: Most mathematicians today get food and shelter (and AI subscriptions) by working at a university. What value do we bring to the university? Currently, it is mostly prestige from our research, and also our utility as teachers of applied math.
English
There are many here who both believe that soon AI will be superhuman at maths, solving all Millenium problems and beyond, and yet also reject any claims that maths is 'dead', and believe that mathematics will thrive.
I'm curious, for those people, what is maths in that future?
English
Technically, that’s still countable.
Devon Eriksen@Devon_Eriksen_
@ChoochSkookum Monotheists are funny, because they don't realize the existence of a single creator god requires another god to create him, who requires another god to create him, and so on. All roads lead to an infinite regress of countless gods.
English
Trump phones were a thing. The WSJ has no article I can find about recent developments/theft. wsj.com/business/telec…
English
@JDHamkins Iirc, Erdős spent a semester during the 1940s at Purdue University. He was assigned to teach a set theory course, despite knowing nothing of the field at the time.
English
Kurt Gödel was a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame in 1939, evidently his first and only paid teaching position. He lectured on the axiomatization of set theory and the axiom of choice—this was just after he had proved the relative consistency.
English
It looks like @ChadJonesEcon is upping the game on paper formatting with propositions shaded. It is a good move. I think I'll copy it.
English
@Anthony_Bonato Correctness is relatively easy these days. Understanding remains difficult. What is the value of a certificate that assures us that Goldbach’s Conjecture (or RH) is true? We already know that!
English
Waiting for the day when AI claims to solve some big problem/conjecture in mathematics and no one can understand the proof so we can't verify whether it is correct
Timothy Gowers @wtgowers@wtgowers
I've recently got in on the act of getting AI to solve open problems in mathematics. More precisely, I gave some questions asked by Melvyn Nathanson to ChatGPT 5.5 Pro, to which I have been given access, and it answered them. 🧵
English