Goodbye, Adley Rutschman

At least it wasn’t the Yankees. Yes, Adley Rutchman, an Oriole yesterday, is a Red Sock today. Not much to say about it that hasn’t been said over the last 20 hours. I understand that h…

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Proposed World Cup rules change

Correct outcome, but imagine if Argentina had won this on penalties without taking a single shot on goal in 120 minutes of actual play! That could easily have happened, and what an embarrassment. M…

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Walking Red Flag

I have trouble sleeping — trouble staying asleep, not trouble falling asleep. I have found that the best way to get back to sleep at three or four in the morning is to listen to a podcast on …

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American Revolution

I was in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago with AB and we went to the brand-new Museum of the American Revolution.  It’s a great work of public history.  Every American, and everybody else w…

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More shoulderblogging

It is possible to open a a peanut butter jar one-handed; the trick is to grasp the jar between the knees and then twist with the left hand. However, I have not figured out how to get a knifeload of…

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People are good and the system works

Yesterday I hit a pothole while biking up N. Allen St. and flew over my handlebars. Lying on the street, unable to get up, bleeding all over the asphalt. Several people stopped to help; one neighbo…

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Recent progress around Cohen-Lenstra heuristics (notes from a Bourbaki talk)

These are the notes from the recent Bourbaki seminar I gave about just some of the remarkable work people have done around the Cohen-Lenstra conjectures in the past few years. I have to submit the …

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Human character, continuity of

“Let’s hazard an assertion: On or about June 2007, human character changed. To be more exact—because the phrase human character now feels antique—we might say instead that the human sensorium…

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The Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics

A well-thought-out statement. One thing I like about it is that it is not in any way anti-AI; the declaration merely says that, as with any other piece of technology, we should use it in ways that …

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Memorial Day

Tomorrow is Memorial Day. William James, in 1897, dedicating the monument to Col. Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th regiment, a monument which still stands in Boston Common today: “And when Sout…

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Roger Brown on “Ms.”

In the fall of 1992, my senior year of college, I took a seminar on Social Psychology of Language with Roger Brown. (Roger Brown the psychologist, not Roger Brown the painter, one of my very favori…

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Minor Epiphany Concerning the World Columbian Exposition of 1894 and John Hughes

It was felt that the 1894 exposition in Chicago needed a big iron monument to rival the Eiffel Tower, and a man named George Washington Gale Ferris had the decisive insight that what the occasion d…

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Brewers 8, Red Sox 6

I was in Boston for Pesach and stuck around an extra day because some more Wisconsinites, the mighty Milwaukee Brewers, were also coming into town to play the Boston nine. CJ and I took in the game…

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Armiversary

Twenty years ago this week (I thought it was twenty years ago today, but I just went back and checked and it was April 3, 2006) I fell down a flight of stairs at MSRI and broke the absolute fuck ou…

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The College Boy and His Problems

“The High School Boy and His Problems” (pdf at link) is a 1921 book by Thomas Arkle Clark, Dean of Men at the University of Illinois. I think “The High School Boy and His Problems…

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In which my daughter invents science

While we ate our pizza I was talking with AB about differential equations, which they’re about to start doing in calculus. We talked about y’=y. “This is why populations grow expo…

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The Irrational Decision

Ben Recht’s book The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us comes out tomorrow! I was privileged to get my copy early. And if you want an opinionated, informed,…

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Networking and granfallooning

It has come to my attention that students at prestigious universities are referring to the practice of cold-emailing alums of their school and asking for Zoom calls to discuss possible summer inter…

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In which I rescue Harvard’s grading system

The Harvard faculty is proposing to hard-cap A’s at 20% per course, leading to an undergraduate crashout the good old Yard has not seen the likes of since,the dining hall discontinued the Chi…

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Waiting for Godot (Gen-X rewrite)

Here’s a good use case for LLMs — they are quite good at recovering the text from files you saved on a Macintosh word processor in the early 90s and have been transporting from computer…

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Now pitching, Cadeler Wellvich

Barring any last-minute moves, and despite being linked to just about every big-name pitcher on the free-agent market, the Orioles will go into 2026 as they left 2025, without a clear #1 starter. D…

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What’s the entropy of a random integer?

Surely people have thought about this but I couldn’t find anything on a short search. The question: let n be a random integer, say in [N,2N]. It factors as the product of p_i^a_i. So you can …

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Dick Gross

Dick Gross died last month. Much has already been written, and during his lifetime too, about his immense contributions to modern number theory. So I won’t try to cover that here — don&…

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It’s a good old-fashioned Wisconsin booger-freezer out there!

One of my favorite weather sayings. And I ran into a neighbor on my way home from the errand I was running so I got to say it in person, always a treat. 3 degrees Fahrenheit, sunny and windy in Mad…

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If one is not to make a mess of life

“One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life, and it is therefore essential that they should not let one down.” From E.M. Forster, “What I Belie…

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Bruhat intervals that are large hypercubes

New paper up on the arXiv! With Nicolas Libedinsky, David Plaza, José Simental, Geordie Williamson, and (unofficially) Adam Zsolt Wagner. A bunch of algebraic combinatorists! And this is a combinat…

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Dyadiku

I made a game. It’s like Sudoku but dyadic. It’s called Dyadiku. Try it! I’m very interested to see whether people find it playable and fun — in particular, does it admit a …

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Reaching the masses (not a Marxist post)

Six popular math authors, including me, did a round-table interview for the Notices of the American Mathematical Society about talking about math to the non-academic public, or, as the Notices call…

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Self-portrait with about one quarter of Richard Serra’s sculpture Equal

Visit the post for more.

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The American people have just one fixed idea

“The American people have just one fixed idea and, since that dominant thought is money, it follows that their spirit has a certain uniform and unpleasant dryness… prodigality is an unf…

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