impendia

4 ms·

1.
by impendia 9d ago
In practice, mathematicians' workloads have been a function of their work ethic, motivation, and competing demands on their time. There's no big-picture question of "how much math there is to do now"; the amount of remai
2.
by impendia 9d ago
As a mathematician, summer salary (from grants) is nice but I could do without it. But external funding, e.g. from the NSF, also supports conferences -- and I suspect that few people would be willing to attend if they had to pay out of pock
3.
by impendia 9d ago
Math professor here. Different academic disciplines are very different, and most don't engage in the same kind of black-and-white problem solving that mathematicians do, where you either have solved a problem or you haven't. But a
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by impendia 11d ago
When online dating goes well, it quickly turns into ordinary dating. And I think that's one important difference: with vibe coding you can't cast aside the AI after you've taken the initial step.
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by impendia 17d ago
I'm a mathematician. I have a lot of trepidation about these tools and what they mean for the future of the profession. That said... most of us are not working on problems as famous as Navier-Stokes. Even if OpenAI could scoop me bas
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by impendia 1mo ago
> those universities that do want to do that As a university professor, I've seen that all universities want to do everything. By which I mean, they employ all sorts of people who are pushing a huge range of agendas. You can't
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by impendia 1mo ago
Update: the linked page has now been updated to say: > it was Claude, with Levent Alpöge and Ava Howell! Alpöge is the same guy who prompted Claude for a proof of the Jacobian conjecture.
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by impendia 1mo ago
I'm a research mathematician, and to me the biggest surprise is that the user didn't identify themselves or (yet) try to claim credit for their work. Within academia, it is to your definite advantage to have your name associated
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by impendia 1mo ago
> The record before this morning was 29 and people suspected that was as high as it got. Exactly this. A fundamental question in the subject is, whether elliptic curve ranks are bounded. Contrast with e.g. prime numbers, of which are kno
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by impendia 1mo ago
From this page by Keith Conrad: https://kconrad.math.uconn.edu/blurbs/ If you're interested in learning any of the advanced math topics covered here, pretty much everything Keith has written is gold.
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by impendia 1mo ago
Mathematician here. There is a lot of recent work on the Lean project -- when a proof can be translated into Lean code, then it can be strictly and formally validated. https://lean-lang.org/ But otherwise, mathematical proo
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by impendia 1mo ago
Indeed, that's who I was thinking of. At the time I thought of them very much as "managers" and not having the same job as me. But I happened to see one of the shift managers' paystubs once, and she was not exactly makin
13.
by impendia 1mo ago
Have front-line employees come under pressure these days? When I worked in fast food, in the nineties, the managers were under pressure to optimize a variety of metrics. But they didn't have a lot of carrots or sticks, and most of th
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by impendia 1mo ago
Once I quit my internet service, and someone representing the internet provider called me and asked if I'd agree to participate in an exit survey. Sure, I said. "On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied were you with..." "Um
15.
by impendia 2mo ago
Guess I got spoiled by reading Kant in one of my college classes. He was all about trying to describe morals based on rules. That said, picture someone killing a kitten and someone else killing a cockroach. One could prevaricate all day wit
16.
by impendia 2mo ago
What would it mean for them to not exist? The issue, as I see it, is that elite credentials are overvalued, and that we live in a society which is becoming more and more unequal, and where housing prices in particular are skyrocketing. With
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by impendia 2mo ago
How are you distinguishing them? I had the impression they were essentially synonyms, and this was borne out by two university courses in philosophy which I took. That said, googling "morals vs ethics" turns up quite an interestin
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by impendia 2mo ago
LOL, pleased to read that Air Canada got smacked down. Yeah, if I'm calling or chatting with a company, I expect them to stand by whatever commitments they make, and I will judge them harshly if they don't. This is true whether an
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by impendia 2mo ago
I have to assume that there are hedge funds or someone like that, already investing extensive effort into trying to get AI to beat the market. I assume that it can't, but if I'm wrong then whoever figures this out stands to get
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by impendia 2mo ago
Yup. I get lots of cold emails from salespeople whose products I couldn't possibly give less of a shit about. But I agree, those aren't what this thread is talking about.
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by impendia 2mo ago
I'm taking group fitness classes at a local gym, and I love them. I assume that AI is quite capable of designing workouts, and creating audio files with instructions that I could take to the gym. But I have no interest in that; the app
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by impendia 2mo ago
One day, my psychiatrist had brought her new dachshund puppy to work, and she invited me to pick him up. He promptly licked all over my face and then fell asleep in my arms. I joked to her that puppies beat SSRIs any day of the week, that s
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by impendia 2mo ago
Thanks, I appreciate it. Yeah, I tried out an online weight loss program (Wondr) that made the same point. When it was video of psychologists, I could definitely understand what they were saying. Unfortunately, when it was video of a chef,
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by impendia 2mo ago
May I ask you to explain yourself? For some people, mealtime is special and a little bit sacred. I have friends who are avid cooks, and for whom eating is often the highlight of their day. I have never been one of those people, and I'm
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by impendia 2mo ago
I'm an academic mathematician, and could you explain your second prediction? It goes entirely against the culture of research mathematics to hoard secrets. If you've done something interesting, you want to share it, and it's
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by impendia 2mo ago
I'm a research mathematician. I can see that you're arguing in good faith, and indeed I have a lot of respect for anyone willing to argue an unpopular position. That said, I do find your suggestion to be completely farfetched. The
27.
by impendia 2mo ago
I have no idea what actually happened behind the scenes, but the human prompter, Levent Alpöge, indeed has deep math expertise. Princeton PhD, Harvard postdoc, and some excellent research (prior to this) to his name. https://alpo
28.
by impendia 2mo ago
For the Jacobian determinant to be constant is a massive coincidence, in general it is some complicated and messy polynomial. The conjecture was that this coincidence couldn't happen, except for simple special cases. So Alpoge and Fa
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by impendia 2mo ago
This is fascinating. That said, if it's possible to do better than random guessing, then does this reflect the fact that the five charts are presumably hand-selected to be "interesting"? My naive guess, and I'd be very c
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by impendia 3mo ago
Indeed, I find this story quite interesting (and disturbing) from the Belgian point of view. Suppose the Belgian government declared the ambassador persona non grata , and sent them on the next plane to Washington. Presumably this would ra

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