Charles T. Chongo

Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska solved a problem that had puzzled mathematicians for over 400 years. Even Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton couldn’t crack it. We live in a three-dimensional world, but Maryna solved a puzzle in an eight-dimensional space—something that’s very hard even to imagine. She was born in Kyiv, studied at Taras Shevchenko University, worked in Bonn and Berlin, and at just 33 became a professor in Lausanne. So what was the problem? It’s about how to pack identical spheres as tightly as possible in space. This question was first asked by Kepler back in 1611. Over time, scientists found answers for two and three dimensions—but not for eight. Maryna proved that in eight dimensions, the densest packing is formed by a special mathematical structure called a lattice. What’s even more amazing is that she did it in just 23 pages, while earlier attempts took hundreds. In 2022, she was awarded the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in mathematics. She became only the second woman in history to receive it. Today, Maryna Viazovska works in Lausanne, supports Ukrainian mathematicians, and brings pride to Ukraine with her achievements.

Luke Falk shared a Mike Leach story that stopped me cold: Two kids. One rich. One poor. Every training camp, Coach Leach told his team about these 2 kids. The rich kid has two choices. Get soft. Get entitled. Expect everything handed to him because he was handed more. Or take the resources, the coaching, the opportunities, and compound them into something greater. The poor kid has two choices too. Say nobody gave him anything. Blame the world. Make his circumstances the reason he never became what he could have been. Or outwork everyone in the room. Luke said the locker room had both. Kids from wealth. Kids from nothing. Kids with every advantage. Kids who scraped for every inch. Same choice for all of them. Ownership or victimhood. Fuel or excuse. The rich kid can waste the head start or build on it. The poor kid can drown in the deficit or weaponize it. Greatness doesn't come from where you start. It comes from which kid you choose to feed. Credit to @coachlukefalk for continuing to share golden nuggets about Coach’s legacy

🚨 On 31 March 2026, a Russian An-26 military transport crashed during a routine flight over occupied Crimea, killing all 29 people on board, including Lt. Gen. Aleksandr Otroshchenko, commander of the Northern Fleet’s Mixed Aviation Corps. 🕵️ Dallas obtained confidential internal documents suggesting this was not just an isolated accident, but part of a broader decline in Russia’s military aircraft maintenance infrastructure. According to Russia’s own officials, the system has been hollowed out by the war against Ukraine, strained by Western sanctions, and undermined by mismanagement at the highest levels. ✈️ Russia still relies on roughly 368 Antonov aircraft across its military and security services, including the An-12, An-26, and An-72. Of these, 143❗currently require repairs. Unless urgent measures are taken, within 18 to 24 months their operation will cease entirely. 📰 Our investigation examines Aviaremont JSC, part of Rostec, a key repair provider for Russia’s military aviation fleet. In December 2025, Aviaremont acknowledged that its subsidiary, 308 ARZ, could not properly service An-series aircraft due to missing design documentation, failed import substitution, and the lack of domestic production for critical spare parts. 🔍 Journalists, analysts, and researchers seeking further detail or access can reach out via our website form dallas-analytics.com/maintained-to-…

🔥⚡️Middlestrike campaign by the Unmanned Forces of Ukraine continues: three SAM systems, two Iskander bases, Rubikon base, two fuel depots and enemy support infrastructure: 🔥 Pantsir-S1 — Feodosia, Crimea (414th Brigade); 🔥 Osa-AK — Vodiane, Donetsk region (414th Brigade); 🔥 Tunguska — Valer'yanivka, Donetsk region (414th Brigade); 🔥 Buk-M1 — Bahativka, Zaporizhzhia region (1st Separate USF Center); 🔥 Iskander OTRK base — Mizhiria, Crimea (414th Brigade); 🔥 Iskander OTRK base — Kurortne, Crimea (414th Brigade); 🔥 Fuel depot “Oktyabrske” — Crimea (414th Brigade); 🔥 Fuel depot Hlybokyi Yar —Crimea (414th Brigade); 🔥 Ammunition depot (758th logistics center, Black Sea Fleet) — Mizhiria, Crimea (413th unit “Raid”); 🔥 Workshop, UAV storage “Rubikon” — Hirne, Donetsk region (1st Separate USF Center)

🚨 ExpoElectronica 2026: how a Russian trade show enables sanctions evasion Dallas analyzed 719 participants of a major electronics exhibition in Moscow and uncovered a network supplying Western components to Russia – despite sanctions. Key findings: 📌 Russian importers continue sourcing electronics for the military-industrial complex; 📌 Chinese companies act as key intermediaries; 📌 Western components (such as Siemens) are routed via third-country intermediaries. Even small firms play a critical role in sustaining Russia’s access to dual-use electronics. ❗️Bottom line: sanctions on Russia alone are not enough without targeting foreign intermediaries. ExpoElectronica effectively serves as a ready-made database of potential sanctions violators. 🔎 Read the full investigation for details dallas-analytics.com/expoelectronic…

Sublime.

"In the initial days of the war, an Iranian F-5 fighter jet bombed the U.S. base Camp Buehring in Kuwait, despite the base having air defenses, a rare breach that marked the first time an enemy fixed-wing aircraft has struck an American military base in years, according to two of the U.S. officials." nbcnews.com/world/iran/ira…

Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine has killed thousands of civilians. He’s threatened the use of nuclear weapons. He’s attempting to erase Ukrainian identity and culture. And he’s forcibly deported children. Zack Polanski should be ashamed of this comment.

If you watched #AmericanUnderdog you got to see a little of this young man’s story… suffering a Traumatic Brain Injury & becoming legally blind at 4 months, the challenges he faced every day and the questions about what life would look like for him! Today, he turns 37 against all odds and overcoming every obstacle! He is one of the greatest joys of my life & one of my biggest inspirations! HBDay Zackman… I love you!!

An MIT professor taught the same math course for 62 years, and the day he retired, students from every country on earth showed up online to watch him give his final lecture. I opened the playlist at 2am and ended up watching three of them back to back. His name is Gilbert Strang. The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra. Every machine learning engineer, every data scientist, every quant, every self-taught programmer who actually understands how AI works learned the math from this one man. Most of them never set foot on MIT's campus. They just opened a free playlist on YouTube and let him teach. Here's the story almost nobody tells you. Strang joined the MIT math faculty in 1962. He retired in 2023. That is 61 years of standing at the same chalkboard teaching the same subject to 18-year-olds. The interesting part is what he did when MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2002. Most professors were skeptical. They worried that putting their lectures online would make their classrooms irrelevant. Strang did not hesitate. He said his life's mission was to open mathematics to students everywhere. He filmed every lecture and gave it away. The decision quietly changed how the world learns math. For decades linear algebra was taught the wrong way. Professors started with abstract vector spaces and proofs about field axioms. Students drowned in the abstraction. Most never recovered. They walked out believing they were bad at math when they had simply been taught in an order that nobody's brain is built to absorb. Strang inverted the entire curriculum. He started with matrix multiplication. Something you can write down on paper. Something you can compute by hand. Something you can see. Then he showed his students that everything else in linear algebra eigenvectors, singular value decomposition, orthogonality, the four fundamental subspaces was just a different lens for understanding what the matrix was actually doing under the hood. His rule was strict. If a student could not explain a concept using a concrete 3 by 3 example, that student did not actually understand the concept yet. The abstraction was supposed to come last, not first. The intuition was the foundation. The proofs were just confirmation that the intuition was correct. The second thing Strang changed was the classroom itself. He said please and thank you to his students. Every single lecture. He paused mid-derivation to ask "am I OK?" to check if anyone was lost. He never used the word "obviously" or "trivially" because he knew exactly what those words do to a student who is one step behind. He treated 19-year-olds learning math for the first time the way he treated his own colleagues. With patience. With respect. With the assumption that they belonged in the room. For 62 years. The result is something that has never happened in the history of education. A single math professor became the default teacher of his subject for the entire planet. Universities in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria, every country with a computer science department, started telling their own students to just watch Strang's lectures. The University of Illinois revised its linear algebra course to do almost no in-person lecturing. The reason was honest. The professor said they could not compete with the videos. His final lecture was in May 2023. The auditorium was packed with students who had never met him before. He walked to the chalkboard, taught for an hour, and at the end the entire room stood and applauded. He looked confused for a moment, like he genuinely did not understand why they were cheering. Then he smiled and waved them off and walked out. His written comment under the YouTube video of that final lecture was four sentences long. He said teaching had been a wonderful life. He said he was grateful to everyone who saw the importance of linear algebra. He said the movement of teaching it well would continue because it was right. That was it. No book promotion. No farewell speech. No legacy management. The man whose teaching is the foundation of modern AI just thanked the audience and went home. 20 million views. Zero ego. The entire engine of the AI revolution sits on top of math that millions of people learned for free from one quiet professor in Cambridge. The course is still on MIT OpenCourseWare. Every lecture, every problem set, every exam, every solution. Free. The most important math course of the 21st century is sitting one click away from you. Most people will never open it.

@Microinteracti1 @lamatzzi Look at them. 🤬

@Microinteracti1 What borders on stupidity? Mexico and Canada

🇫🇷 French General Michel Yakovleff: "American officials need to stop snorting cocaine between meetings" France’s most quotable general just said out loud what every European defence official has been thinking privately for two months. General Michel Yakovleff, former NATO deputy chief of staff, has had enough. His assessment of American diplomatic coherence in the Iran negotiations: stop snorting cocaine between meetings. A French general saying, with the particular exhaustion of someone who has sat through too many briefings, that the US side appears chemically incapable of maintaining a consistent position from one room to the next. And he’s not wrong. In the past 72 hours alone, Washington announced direct talks, Tehran denied direct talks, Vance was going, then Vance wasn’t going, Kushner was going, the Iranians reached out, the Iranians said nothing was planned, and Hegseth called the whole operation “laser-focused.” On what, exactly, remains classified. The French have a word for this. Several, actually. None of them polite. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

Orbán-linked oligarchs are transferring tens of billions of forints to the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Uruguay, and other distant countries. I am aware that Hungary’s National Tax and Customs Administration (NAV), based on reports from banks, has suspended several high-value transfers linked to Antal Rogán’s circle on suspicion of money laundering. I call on the leadership of NAV to immediately freeze these stolen funds. I once again call on the Prosecutor General, the National Police Chief, and the head of NAV to detain the criminals who have caused thousands of billions of forints in damage to the Hungarian people, and not to allow them to flee — before the formation of a TISZA government — to countries from which extradition is currently not possible. I am also aware that Orbán-linked oligarchs have begun selling TV2 and other media outlets at below-market prices, including the Rogán-linked propaganda flagship, Lounge Event Kft. I call on responsible domestic and international investors to refrain from acquiring assets linked to the mafia; otherwise, they may find themselves facing the National Office for Asset Recovery and Protection. I have also been informed that several oligarch families have already left the country, and that the Mészáros family is expected to travel to Dubai in the coming days. According to reports, several influential oligarch families have already withdrawn their children from school and are arranging trusted security personnel for their departure.

@Maks_NAFO_FELLA If the other G20 members allow this thing 👇 attend the meeting then we can all forget that there's any hope for decency from world leaders.

🇮🇹 Meloni Opposes Putin's Invitation to G20 Summit "The Americans, especially in recent months, have taken, let's say, several steps towards Russia, and on the other hand we have not seen the same number of steps in response. I believe that now is the time to demand them."

‼️Two British Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft based in Romania shot down Russian drones over Ukrainian territory - Romania Defense Ministry. Groundbreaking. P.S. Very grateful to Romania for clearly stating that it was a Russian attack against Ukrainian civilian targets

Ukrainian AAA gunner shooting down a Russian Shahed attack drone at near point blank range with his M2 Browning .50 HMG yesterday.

😂😂😂😂😂

@Gerashchenko_en The Kremlin no longer can deny that the Ukraine War has come to Russia. It’s only a matter of time when 13 million people in the Moscow region hit the streets. Russian spring is around the corner. Will it be the last one for Putin’s stranglehold over Russia?