Thoughts on the dead singer. Yesterday, my middle aged straight hairy biker son went on one on social media about the dead singer and those eulogising him. He did not hold back. What was unusual was that he took to social media to vent knowing it would attract vile bile. I asked him why.

Willa Cather figuring out how to completely savage me from 100 years in the past😭

eileen chengyin chow@chowleen.bsky.social · 4d ago

"When the first of August came round, the Professor realized he had pleasantly trifled away nearly two months at a task which should have taken little more than a week." -Willa Cather (from The Professor's House, 1925)

It's extremely rare that I see a math paper take history at all seriously. The writing in this paper by Asok, Bachmann and Hopkins is inspiring to me; writing here in part to remember to find time to read it... arxiv.org/abs/2607.26190

Algebraic vs. analytic: a survey

Given a pair of complex algebraic varieties, we can ask: does every analytic map admit an algebraic representative? Such questions are most interesting when the source and target are non-compact varie...

arxiv.org

I remember there being some stuff about "exceptional coffee" in the branding but sadly I didn't capture photographic evidence.

Just as @plashingvole.bsky.social noted, a lot of this is familiar at Sheffield. Losing modules + merging 10 credits into 20 at level 3 feels particularly painful; our big selection was a selling point at open days. That multiple universities all converge on same changes is...interesting.

Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · last wk.

'Strip away the grandiose language and a pattern emerges – some combination of fewer, larger modules, almost always wedges of 30 credits, an all-core or heavily prescribed first year, reduced optionality in later years, curated pathways instead of individual module choice... [cont.] 1/4

I liked this one so I tried to make it math.mino.mobi/cohomology Which is cool enough to share but obviously so different from the fabulous century work

Fenrir@fenrir.davidar.io · last wk.

art #1148 'Cohomology.' discrete Hodge decomposition on a triangulated plane with holes — decompose a random 1-form into exact, coexact, and harmonic. the harmonic part is what remains: pure topological flow circulating around the voids. amber flows one way, teal the other.

Translation: Uni is not for the likes of you, and besides we've cut the places and we need people to pick the crops and wipe the arses. (The man delivering this message has an English degree from Cambridge)

Schools to offer technical subjects to pupils from age 14, Burnham says

The government wants pupils to take courses like AI and manufacturing which are linked to local jobs.

bbc.co.uk

While the Fields Medal celebrates the under-40s, the mathematician Joan Birman has, at the age of 99, solved a major open problem in representations of the Braid groups, a topic she has worked on for more than 60 years.

It's a question often asked: who had the best legs in Hollywood's Golden Age? Well, buckle up, nerds, it's time for some gam theory.

My default position on cheating in classes is that assholes exist and you can't engineer them away, so you should instead radically accept the existence of assholes and instead design good classes for people who want to learn.

Bjørn Ihler@bjornih.bsky.social · 3w ago

One pet peeve of mine is that we spend an insane amount of time, money, and resources on bad people doing bad things to prevent them from being bad and doing bad things, but we spend little on good people doing good things - the imbalance may have the consequence that fewer people do good things.

Let me expand upon this 🔽 and say something about AIs, mathematics, proofs, conjectures, problem-solving, goalposts, paperclips, genii and, more importantly, Campbell/Goodhart's law. 🧵⤵️ •1/38

Gro-Tsen@gro-tsen.bsky.social · 2w ago

… it turns out that, as LLMs have shown us, you can solve problems without developing any interesting math or teaching us much of worth, so the “problem solving” criterion was wrong all along (or only applicable for humans). Now this is embarrassing because it looks like the goalposts are moving. …

Trying to figure out how to feel / react to the barrage of AI proofs and counterexamples. Don't think I'm this fatalistic, but it brought to mind John Henry, particularly this live version by Cécile McLorin Salvant. Aaron Diehl's entry on "cold steel ring" ahhhhh www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX4j...

Cécile McLorin Salvant - John Henry (live on KCRW)

YouTube video by Mack Avenue

youtube.com

Local plumbers two steps ahead of every university administrator in america 👏

Metin Seven (Moon Child's dad 🌝)@seven.eurosky.social · 3w ago

Oban sunset.

9pm, two days after harvest

"She kept her gazo on the plaza, so I could look at the side of her face." Well late to the party but Murderbot making me cry in the coffeeshop. Have had a few scenes of gently accomodating needs just gut me recently.

Beautiful tribute to Adriano Garsia: arxiv.org/abs/2607.14184 I never met him, but he sent me an email with effusive praise of my simultaneous cores paper and an invitation to visit for a week in 2015 (he was 86?!) Reading the memories of his students and collaborators I wish I'd made it work...

A memorial tribute: Adriano Garsia (1928--2024)

Adriano Mario Garsia was born in Tunis on August 20, 1928, to a Tunisian-Italian family. He lived on a farm there until the end of World War II, then moved to Rome. After finishing high school, he was...

arxiv.org

Thing about British Steel being nationalised is there is no argument around nationalising it that doesn't also apply to the universities except "steel is boy coded :) and teaching is girl coded :("

Just had meeting with kiddo's school. She has been fully supported, treated with full equality & dignity for years. All of that changes from September. Full segregation & humiliation across the board. The school staff cried in the meeting. This will absolutely lead to children's deaths 1/2

One of the things I miss most, along with heirloom tomatoes from the farmer's market.

Dr Alex Bond@thelabandfield.bsky.social · 4w ago

My kingdom for a 5pm prairie thunderstorm that drops the temperature by 8C in 20 minutes while blustery winds, torrential rain, and cracking lightning pass through to kill the heat of the day.

I'll say it again, as I do almost every day in some context: the way policy is set up right now, most British universities will either radically downsize or close in this Parliament or the next. Only a small elite of c.10 to 20 will be recognisable as univs at all. How do people not know this?

Fuck. This. They've been using that rise in tuition fees to claim they've stabilised the sector. They've used it to say it's ok to raise national insurance contributions. They're now using it to cut one of the few stable things. Logic and maths aren't big in the Department of Education, are they?

Times Higher Education (THE)@timeshighered.bsky.social · last mo.

The Department for Education has confirmed that universities will receive £50.9 million less in teaching grants next academic year. Bridget Phillipson, the education minister has defended the reduction in light of tuition fee rises. https://ow.ly/6UWJ50ZkLlf

Good read, and much ports over easily to the context of pure maths talks, but of course it doesn't all map nicely. I think maths could learn "the talk is not the paper" better, be more aware of themselves as advertisements for the paper, the concepts, the speaker, the (sub)-field.

Kieran Healy@kjhealy.co · last mo.

Somewhat more constructively, and in lieu of me saying something rude.

"It’s nice to sell books like this, in the corner of a pub, from a carrier bag, impromptu and faintly illicit. It’s a transaction but it’s more than that. It’s a moment of connection that starts with the book but is not necessarily centred on the book." When the band runs the merch table.

Longbarrow Press@longbarrowpress.bsky.social · last mo.

"A cancelled book launch. Not the end of the world. What would that look like. Would we know it if we saw it. I rise to leave. My clothes are damp with sweat. I’ve scarcely moved in the last two hours." 'Seven Degrees': on cancellations and connections longbarrowpress.substack.com/p/seven-degr...

Forgot how still and calm Ben is on stage, especially compared to Dave's twitchy exuberance. Not at all the guy you'd expect that solo from. A highlight for me was Reid's solo introing Salvages. Gotta listen to the albums with Orrin more.

Paul Johnson@ptwiddle.bsky.social · last mo.

Don't remember what he said, but remember him priming us as it built to a climax, cranking the volume up for this bombastic guitar solo that could be off a hair metal track, and then everything dropped away and there was a messy, discordant chord on the guitar.

On a train to Manchester to see The Bad Plus for the 10th (?!) and final (!?!?!) time, and feeling it. A thread? I struggle with being a fan. Seeing the faults. Being judged for the sins and shortcomings of other fans. "Yes, Infinite Jest is my favourite book, but I'm not *that guy*. Promise."

An MP gets it! I am so relieved to see an MP Getting It! Not isolated, nor solely education (however devastating that is!), but research infrastructure that's being set on fire for the entire country.

Nadia Whittome MP@nadiawhittomemp.bsky.social · last mo.

University of Nottingham staff are facing cuts to more than 600 jobs and over 40 courses. This would be devastating for workers, students, and our city, as well as UK research.

This is the one true recipe for a Reflecting Pool: 2oz rum, 4oz pineapple juice, 1oz blue curacao, one Blue Razzberry Fruit Roll-Up