FWIW, this happened to me for years. Not a single school even sent me an interview request for 3 years, until one school finally did (BU) and I got in there. Please don't give up on the things you are passionate about, keep trying!

ayeshanman.bsky.social@ayeshanman.bsky.social · 4d ago

🥺 Got another rejection email from a PhD position I applied to....

Just bc I see both of you saying similar sentiments about math & physics here, and I feel this way too, @uberwensch.bsky.social and @noncommutativity.bsky.social have you guys seen this movie? I watch it approximately once a month and it really helps me feel better. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkRR...

Look Back - Official Trailer | Prime Video

YouTube video by Prime Video

youtube.com

Arula Ratnakar@arula-ratnakar.bsky.social · 3d ago

I'm constantly studying and I still feel like I only know a tiny fraction of what everyone on here knows. And the math and physics PhD students in my classes who seem 100x quicker than I am (I need to think about stuff for hours or days sometimes before it clicks)

I want to learn enough math that I can tackle this someday as part of my research

Arula Ratnakar@arula-ratnakar.bsky.social · 2d ago

It would help so many people if something “like” the perturbative statistical field theory approach existed, that could describe all statistical moments for a nonlinear SDE, but actually converge to the finite moments!!

I think i can figure out the Doi Peliti formalism now, especially since i can achieve the exact same action via a change of variables through MSRDJ (which i know how to do). I have a too-busy week until the 16th with exams and lab meeting presentations but after the 16th i think ill try it out.

👀 arxiv.org/abs/2610.10072

Microscopy images are scientific evidence, and that image processing must be transparent and faithful to the underlying biology. Reinforce those standards, especially now-insist Nikon uphold them. #NikonSWiM2026 Read the letter: tinyurl.com/OpenLetterSW... Add your name: forms.gle/TyGRELnCxq5z...

otoh, I don't think it's clear that a path integral that's well-defined all the way down to the continuum limit is really a reasonable or necessary thing to ask for. It's mathematically interesting, but physically it seems more likely that there is a physical regularization at some scale

I'm so mogged by everyone around me in everything lmao

Arula Ratnakar@arula-ratnakar.bsky.social · 2w ago

Grad school kind of makes us feel like whatever we know and find joy in is trivial and inconsequential. idk if repeated exposure to this is good.

I don't believe any open math problem should be considered "solved" on the basis of AI-generated machine-language proofs alone. This is why: arxiv.org/abs/2610.08144

Navier-Stokes lost in translation: Why Lean verification of AI autoformalisation does not guarantee correct natural language proofs

Autoformalisation is increasingly used to verify mathematical texts, including those generated by AI, as in OpenAI's announced proof of blow-up of solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations. In this pro...

arxiv.org

Bro because of this measure theory based probability class i can literally make up my own universe and say stuff about what will happen in it. A Sci fi writing dream.

You can figure so much stuff out using Borel Cantelli lemmas it’s insane. A random walker starting at position 0 will return to position 0 infinitely often in dimensions 1 and 2, but not in dimensions higher than 2.

I only remember a few things at a time (indicator functions, continuity of probability, Borel Cantelli, the fact that the complement of lim sup of A is the lim inf of A complement, law of total probability, maybe a few other things. I force a proof out of the few things i remember all the time

All mathematical areas need new frameworks and they have to decide which problems are interesting. OpenAI doesn’t have sufficient experts to understand the content they generate. Some mathematicians were overly fixated on solving specific conjectures, but we know we need a bigger vision

I think there are still mathematical areas AI can’t help with. Things where we need totally new frameworks to conceptualize something, that do not currently exist. And I do think neuro needs those frameworks.

Stuff like this, I doubt AI can figure out: bsky.app/profile/john...

John C. Baez@johncarlosbaez.bsky.social · 7d ago

In physics, renormalization deals with the fact that individual terms in the perturbative expansion are divergent integrals. Even once we've handled that, we get a series that doesn't converge. In all the really interesting cases, nobody has figured out how to deal with that. (Okay: ignore it.)

As always, there’s a relevant Futurama clip

Terry Tao @teorth.bsky.social: Indiscriminate brute-force application of AI to mathematics is depleting the field of good questions without renewing this resource or providing commensurate value. OpenAI: We hear you. Here's a .zip file with 377 hasty AI solutions to important open problems.

OpenAI Releases Findings on 377 Math Problems, Further Roiling Field (Gift Article)

After a previous solution angered mathematicians, the company characterized the new release as being more responsive to concerns about A.I. disrupting research.

nytimes.com

Been thinking recently maybe I should give up on the idea of becoming a professor someday if I am forced to use frontier AI models to be competitive. I want a life where I can think about questions that interest me, learn, create meaningful things, and help future generations too.

It is neat that AI can do this. But I think I’m still going to read the full original untranslated paper (for Markovs inequality) and try to figure it out from the mathematical statements. idk. man, I just don’t want to ever depend on AI. It is fast but I want a journey of my own thoughts.

Juan Diego Rodriguez@juand-r.bsky.social · 4d ago

I got curious about this and got Claude to research it, translating the originals and summarizing them claude.ai/artifact/VQD...

Tbh I still can’t believe I survived my quals. I spent several months preparing, survived a 3 hour long oral exam on stuff ranging from dynamical systems to stochastic processes to details of corticogenesis/dev bio, I wrote this giant thesis proposal, and responded to 35 comments/revisions on it.

It could have been Markov or Chebyshev actually

Arula Ratnakar@arula-ratnakar.bsky.social · 5d ago

I was just reviewing my notes and under a summary with multiple inequalities on it (Markov, Chebyshev and Kolmogorov) I have also written “100 years ago this took many pages to prove, he had to define lots of stuff from scratch, indicator functions and expectation values did not exist, LOOK THIS UP”

Apparently the original proof of the Kolmogorov inequality was several pages long and at the time people didn’t have good conceptualization of indicator functions, or even expectation values, and so Kolmogorov defined a bunch of stuff from scratch I really, *really* want to find this original proof

I’m really basing my decisions in this PhD on a conviction that statistical mechanics is useful for embryonic neurodevelopment…

Bro I’m only in the first class out of a set of 3 that are supposed to get you to be able to work on SDEs at a research level in maths and there is honestly just so much to know.

If lemmas are in service to some larger more important theorem, what is the larger more important theorem the Borel Cantelli lemmas are in service of? They seem like standalone theorem-like things to me and it makes me confused about what should be a lemma vs a theorem.

the only way i actually remember lim sup vs lim inf is by thinking "soup (sup) is in a bowl, so the U (a bowl) is innermost"

Our multilayer MEG paper is out today in Nature Communications: depth-resolved laminar inference in humans 🧠#neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Multilayer MEG source modelling enables depth-resolved laminar inference in humans - Nature Communications

Researchers developed a multilayer MEG framework that estimates activity across cortical depth non-invasively. Simulations and three human datasets show when reliable laminar inference is possible, en...

nature.com

I love my research bc Im able to think about maths & biology and it’s all allowed. If I think about properties of asymptotic series that’s allowed for my research, or about subtypes of progenitor cells, that’s allowed, or if I want to think about stochastic differential equations it’s allowed…

Awesome!!! Congratulations to them and to optogenetics!!!

Nobel Prize@nobelprize.org · 6d ago

BREAKING NEWS The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.”

ugh on the bus this guy in front of me kept coughing with his head politely turned away from his friends in front of him but the coughs went right into my face.