Brian Hayes

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Brian Hayes

Brian Hayes

@bit_player

Words, numbers, bits, pixels.

Chapel Hill, NC Katılım Haziran 2011
341 Takip Edilen1K Takipçiler
Brian Hayes
Brian Hayes@bit_player·
@AlgebraFact In 2015 Robert D. Matson reported a search through 4 x 10^11 without a fourth solution.
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Algebra Etc.
Algebra Etc.@AlgebraFact·
For which values of n is n!+1 a square? There are three known solutions: 4, 5, and 7. No other solutions < 10^9. // Brocard's problem.
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Brian Hayes
Brian Hayes@bit_player·
Doug Lenat has died. Doug was both a champion and a critic of artificial intelligence. He argued for the importance of common sense in AI (and in life, for that matter). From 2008, commenting on the Turing test:
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Brian Hayes
Brian Hayes@bit_player·
World Conference of Science Journalists, Medellín, Colombia. Venue for plenary talks: la Orquideorama at the Jardin Botanico.
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Brian Hayes
Brian Hayes@bit_player·
@dtkung Frost heave; needle ice. It's a fascinating phenomenon (in which mathematics, of course, has a proper place).
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Dave Kung (龚仲孝)🇺🇦☮️
Help! Here's an ice structure we found in the woods after a night where it was barely freezing (28 degrees or so.) For scale it's about 8" across. What is it? How does it form?
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Brian Hayes
Brian Hayes@bit_player·
Grandparent of the OEIS, published 50 years ago. See arxiv.org/abs/2301.03149. (The squiggles above and below the title are stamp-folding diagrams. "The full sequence begins 1,1,2,5,14,38,120,353,1148,3527,..., A001011. No formula is known.")
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Brian Hayes
Brian Hayes@bit_player·
@michael_nielsen Sorry, I forgot the twitter sarcasm emoji. I *did* notice the petitio principii.
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Michael Nielsen
Michael Nielsen@michael_nielsen·
Curious: has anyone seen anything written by ChatGPT that seems as original & insightful as this?
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Brian Hayes
Brian Hayes@bit_player·
@iconjack Carr has 13K tweets and I've looked at only the most recent 50. But of those 39 were math/stats-related, and only three had any obvious bearing on race.
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𝕀𝕁𝕂
𝕀𝕁𝕂@iconjack·
@bit_player Well, with all due respect, you didn't do your homework on this one. Dr. Carr tweets about race all the time, and there's quite a bit of snark, and quite a bit of anti-white racism in there. Here's one example of many: twitter.com/kareem_carr/st…
Dr Kareem Carr@kareem_carr

“Whiteness” is the end product of dehumanizing and homogenizing people with white-enough-skin as a tool of social cohesion and social control. It’s not dehumanizing to discuss whiteness. Whiteness is dehumanization itself.

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Brian Hayes
Brian Hayes@bit_player·
Just the other day I was marveling out loud about the sweetness and rationality of mathematical Twitter. No hate and snark in *this* corner of the Twitterverse. I should have known the experience might be different without my white face.
Dr Kareem Carr@kareem_carr

Feeling a bit bummed out by all the racism I have to deal with on this site. It feels so excessive given I mostly tweet about math and statistics not politics. So many people on here can’t see past my skin color. They make up wild statements about me and question my humanity.

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Brian Hayes
Brian Hayes@bit_player·
@JimPropp Maybe not so far-fetched! That community (von Neumann, Ulam, Metropolis) were fond of games. On the other hand, if you want an A...A place, why not Antarctica or Argentina or Alabama or Alaska or...
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James Propp
James Propp@JimPropp·
@bit_player This isn’t strictly relevant, but if you play the car trip game where each person has to name a place whose first letter is the last letter of the place that was just named, and you omit the no-repeats rule, then “American Samoa” leads to itself.
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Brian Hayes
Brian Hayes@bit_player·
In 1954 Nick Metropolis discussed a certain iterated function system with an isolated fixed point (lower left of the diagram). "Such a number is called 'samoan'," he says. Can anyone explain the meaning or origin of that term?
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Nalini Joshi
Nalini Joshi@monsoon0·
So father (known for Markov chains) and son formed a Markov chain 🤦🏽‍♀️ ?
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Brian Hayes
Brian Hayes@bit_player·
@porges Metropolis, N. 1954. Phase shifts—middle squares—wave equation. In Meyer, Herbert A. (ed.). 1956. Symposium on Monte Carlo Methods. (The relevant section discusses von Neumann's middle-square algorithm for pseudorandom numbers.)
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Brian Hayes
Brian Hayes@bit_player·
The paper: Metropolis, N. 1954. Phase shifts—middle squares—wave equation. In Meyer, Herbert A. (ed.). 1956. Symposium on Monte Carlo Methods.
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Brian Hayes
Brian Hayes@bit_player·
@yenergy @USPS Two packages shipping separately. (The USPS is in the shipping business, after all.)
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Brian Hayes
Brian Hayes@bit_player·
@monsoon0 I really hope it works out for you, but I have fabulous pencils and papers, and yet I STILL haven't proved the Riemann hypothesis.
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Nalini Joshi
Nalini Joshi@monsoon0·
In addition to “over-engineered” mechanical pencils, I also lust after great paper. Just saw a 157gsm acid-free pad of paper – surely mathematics works out easier, smoother and faster with such heavenly instruments …
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