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Michael Barany

@mbarany.com

Historical and cultural theories about maths and science theories. Fields Medal killjoy. Scotland enjoyer. formerly @mbarany on birdsite and intermittently @mjb@mathstodon.xyz on fediverse

1406 Posts893 Follower652 Folgt
Dorothy Bishop@deevybee.bsky.social · 2d ago

This is a very disturbing read by Philip Moriarty about the corporate consultants at University of Nottingham, whose "bloodless prime-LLM-grade corporate boilerplate" called Future Nottingham 2 is guiding decision-making - cuts, cuts and more cuts. muircheartblog.wpcomstaging.com/2026/10/07/j...

Just how much of Future Nottingham 2 was written by vastly overpaid consultants?

PA Consulting misled a government department, threatened the press, and over-charged the NHS up to £2,500 a day. So why is a PA consultant listed as the author of the Future Nottingham 2 business c…

muircheartblog.wpcomstaging.com

Ben Williamson@benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 3d ago

While the current turn against Turnitin responds to its plan to use student essays for AI training, the underlying extractive model was there all along. Students wrote the work; Turnitin took market advantage from being the obligatory portal for submissions. But now...? wonkhe.com/blogs/a-supp...

A supplier shouldn’t be able to rewrite who owns students’ essays

Sam Dickinson looks at Turnitin’s paused plan to put student essays to work on AI – and finds that neither anonymisation nor university regulations answer the copyright question

wonkhe.com

New-Cleckit Dominie@ncdominie.bsky.social · 5d ago

Behind all the arguments about the value of formalisation and capitalised Truth, I think it's as simple as this: how do we respond to a bully? It's a long time since I was in school, but I don't recall that adoring the bully and hoping they'd be nice to me ever paid off.

Alexander Kasprzyk@amkasprzyk.bsky.social · 5d ago

…assistance of professional mathematicians in the areas, and chose to attempt to answer not just one or two, but as many as possible. This is about power, and nothing to do with mathematics. They’re forcefully asserting their dominance over us. They’re saying, “We are in control; you are powerless.”

Michael Barany@mbarany.com · 5d ago

importantly, most theorems in pure mathematics are exhaust fumes from other things (training, trying to build collective understanding, maintaining systems of employment and recognition, etc), so this is a different kind of exhaust but it's not unrelated

Pwnallthethings@pwnallthethings.bsky.social · 5d ago

I bet that's how you get to what happened today: a bulk release of significant results. Released to avoid that internal conflict. Results that tbqh probably deserve better than to be mass-dumped. But these aren't proofs to prove them. They're the exhaust fumes of the math eval factory.

Pwnallthethings@pwnallthethings.bsky.social · 5d ago

I bet that's how you get to what happened today: a bulk release of significant results. Released to avoid that internal conflict. Results that tbqh probably deserve better than to be mass-dumped. But these aren't proofs to prove them. They're the exhaust fumes of the math eval factory.

Alexander Kasprzyk@amkasprzyk.bsky.social · 5d ago

…assistance of professional mathematicians in the areas, and chose to attempt to answer not just one or two, but as many as possible. This is about power, and nothing to do with mathematics. They’re forcefully asserting their dominance over us. They’re saying, “We are in control; you are powerless.”

Michael Barany@mjb.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 2w ago

sitting on loads of counterexamples to major conjectures but honestly I'm not in it for the glory, might leak via various channels that won't be traceable back to me just in case other people would find the results useful

Sarah T Roberts, PhD@ubiquity75.xyz · 5d ago

It also never ceases to amaze me that administrators will come before faculty and to say they plan to make a decision, eliminate a service, reduce a resource, etc., based on input from “consultants.” They say it straight to a roomful of consultants whose informed opinions they could have for free.

singular locus sarah@scgriffith.bsky.social · 5d ago

they're focusing on math early because it's evidently amenable to their tech and it has a lot of pr power. what we see in software development and what we see in math are the private and public mirrors of each other, respectively. the goal is to be between you and whoever will pay you to think

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · last wk.

University leaders seem to forget that "the public" includes students, faculty, and staff who study and work at the institutions they lead. The "public" is not some external, amorphous thing to the university. If you can't treat the people on your campus with decency, then yeah, they won't trust you

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · last wk.

Higher ed leaders are worried about the "decline of public trust"; what are they doing about the fact that faculty, students, and staff at their own institutions do not trust them to lead effectively, defend academic freedom, and meet the challenges of the moment?

Devin Fitzgerald, bibliothot@devinfitz.bsky.social · last wk.

Does it suck that many of say, our Islamic manuscripts were never described? Sure. But it sucks a lot more that institutions across the country have decided to stop collecting to "assess backlogs" at the precise moment we also decided to diversify collecting practices.

Jacqueline Antonovich@jackiantonovich.bsky.social · last wk.

In 1974, Cornell lecturer Lin Farley began recognizing a pattern in the experiences women shared in her Women and Work course: women were being pushed out of jobs by men’s sexual behavior. Farley coined the term, “sexual harassment.”