Jack Zhang

Our takeaway: Don’t just throw an optimizer at arbitrary grammars, design the grammar for descent! Paper: Design for Descent: What Makes a Shape Grammar Easy to Optimize? Authors: @milin_k_, @jackzzhang, @nmwsharp, @AdrianaSchulz7 Project: computationaldesign.group/publications/d…

We show that these properties matter through ablations over grammar variants and compare against existing random-walk approaches like RJMCMC. Grammars that satisfy more of our guidelines consistently converge faster and reach better optima.

Can we apply gradient descent to discrete changes? In our new #SIGGRAPHAsia paper, we show that gradient descent can work on shape grammars, as in CAD and procedural modeling, but only if the grammars are designed correctly!

@_onionesque Linear algebra became category theory, it’s not really taught but at some point we should know everything. And it turns out linear algebra is actually important 🤣

I’m not sure if it’s still true, but one of the funniest quirks about UChicago that I enjoyed a lot was that it was very common to run into math undergrads who knew a whole lot about commutative algebra, but would seem to know nothing about even basic linear algebra.

@Anthony_Bonato Hatcher my beloved

One of the things I love about Halloween is people sharing scary things. Here's one:

@Anthony_Bonato Real v complex manifolds is another story

The story of every undergraduate math major

@keenanisalive Great lecturers I had do all of these on the blackboard, sparingly. One caveat about pictures is that they can lead to bad intuition. For instance if we draw a closed set on the board it’s always a region bounded by a closed curve, but irl closed sets become extremely complex.

There is a selection bias in college-level mathematics education: We believe that the status quo works well because it works for the top students (who go on to do PhDs, etc.). Yet it often works poorly for students in the “middle of the class.”

@EinsteinLeDuc @keenanisalive They can effortlessly create their own intuitions and link examples. In the extremes I’ve seen in class, they can “predict” what theorems come next despite having no prior knowledge of the lesson plan, because they extracted so much information from the definitions given.

@keenanisalive How do the top students do without the things you just listed?

Jack was one of the first students in our group 3DL! He did a couple of awesome works with us during his undergrad. Check out his papers and make sure to follow his journey as he starts as a PhD student in @uwcse with @AdrianaSchulz7 ! zzhang-18.github.io

@sellan_s To me it feels like the other way around, the surface is an explicit system of equations. And implicit functions can be extracted locally at points on the surface, under conditions by IFT. So these functions (hence their graphs) are implicit in the surface.

@Anthony_Bonato Dessin d’enfant

What one thing in mathematics blew your mind when you first learned it?

@shakked_noy @danielluo_pi Topology is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural

@d0llp4rtsz Underrated

@taz_chu Such an amazing book

@J_Zane_Miller Unemployed /s

@taz_chu But the relationship will still be unoriented

@J_Zane_Miller Ah yes, the classic Gaussian smiles