Bren Professor of Computational Biology @caltech. Blog at https://xitter.twitterapi.xyz/t.co/FFQzhEsmhi. Tweets represent my views, not my employer's. #methodsmatter
Pasadena, CA
Joined April 2009
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"This is a bounded comparison, not a claim to have classified all nine-ray coverings or established worldwide priority."
LOLSOB.
As math research is increasingly carried out by AI agents, effective communication and engaging exposition become ever more important for human participation in the process.
We introduce mathdb.com/papers at MathDB, where we welcome a wide variety of research and expository papers, which may be accompanied by videos, code, and Lean formalization. Community comments and reviews are also supported.
I was just reading the paper "Genome diversity in Ukraine" academic.oup.com/gigascience… which mentions Jews exactly once as part of a list of "smaller minority groups" that were "historically present".
There were 2.5 million Jews in Ukraine pre-WWII. 1.5 million murdered. Now ~30,000
Found out last night that Thayer Scudder has passed away. He was an Anthropology professor @Caltech, and I had the privilege of taking his class as an undergraduate. One of the best classes I've ever taken. He was an amazing man with great integrity. May his memory be a blessing.
The dire wolf Colossal fiasco was embarrassing. And, it turns out, a prelude to this...
Warhound, the brain child of Ben Lamm and Palmer Luckey, emerges from stealth to genetically engineer dogs for military and law enforcement.
spr.ly/6011BHZNMF
edgePython v0.5.0 released at github.com/pachterlab/edgePy… (`pip install edgepython`)
Matches the forthcoming edgeR 5.0 with several extra features as well as some edgeR bugs avoided.
Major speedups (4-6x faster, camera >100x), I/O improvements, and proper support for kallisto.
Nice to see someone porting kallisto to rust: github.com/deminden/kallisto…
There is still a way to go in terms of validation and the gamut of kallisto features (+ bustools, lr-kallisto, kb-python etc.) but it's looking good.
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So after weeks of hearing about how mathematics is not about the results per se, but about the journey and the understanding that comes with it…
… the truth turns out to be that all along it was just about the results.
In the US, we graduate on the order of 1000 math PhDs a year, and there are about 300 postdoc jobs (and ~70 tenure track jobs three years later). So no, a math PhD is not, and has never been, a "gold medal" (in the sense of an academic position).
And is "merit" about potential or about actual results? I really hope it's not the former (which is much more error prone to measure)!
About Zhang specifically, there's much more to his story than what's been reported, and it's devastating how much he suffered before his breakthrough.
This is a crazy take.
Yitang Zhang was "unknown" *because* math is *not* a meritocracy. He was kicked out of mathematics because his advisor didn't want his own errors uncovered. Other mathematicians didn't give a @$#!. Zhang lived in his car, worked at Subway.
This is the exact opposite interpretation of what actually happened. The case of Yitang Zhang perfectly illustrates how mathematics culture, at its best, is a pure meritocracy. Regardless of how “unknown” you may be, write a paper that proves a longstanding problem and we will read it, and if it’s right, then you will be instantly recognized as a hero by the community.
This part of mathematics may now be gone forever (due to AI), and this is very sad; this is one aspect of what so many of us are mourning, even as we look with awe at all the amazing discoveries we’ve already been gifted and many more sure to come.
Suggesting that somehow the acceptance of Zhang's Annals paper is evidence of "pure meritocracy" is absurd. It's chutzpah.
quantamagazine.org/yitang-zh…
Grant Sanderson (@3blue1brown) is the most influential mathematician of the 21st century.
Very sad to learn today of the passing of James Lloyd. linkedin.com/pulse/vale-dr-j…
The @CollegeBoard: "AP Exams..enable secondary school students to demonstrate college-level achievement"
Also @CollegeBoard: "Do you want to figure out how quickly you’ll reach 10,000 followers on Instagram? ..AP Precalculus..can help you calculate your rise to influencer status"
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Rota lesson #4 (from the ten lessons he wished he'd been taught).
To the extent that mathematics is getting mogged by AI goodharting, it’s because mathematics goodharted itself into this position by rewarding the solving of conjectures over understanding, exposition, and pretty much everything else.
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Lesson #5 also comes into focus now. The unreasonable effectiveness of AI is likely due, in part, to it not being hamstrung by just a few tricks.
Source: ams.org/notices/199701/comm-…
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The three-story house at 00:10 is for sale for $4.95 million. redfin.com/CA/Long-Beach/651…
Large swells slam into Long Beach, California as multiple homes hold on for dear life to not fall.
@MyRadarWX @MaxVelocityWX #cawx
Ummm... science.org/content/article/…
What is the maximum quartet distance between two trees?
It's probably best not to talk during salsa but if you're going to chat, how about catching up on the answer to this question?
(based on arxiv.org/abs/2608.03542)
I’m old enough to remember when mathematicians used to say that citations don’t mean anything in mathematics.
To highlight the disparity on how subfields have been affected by the OAI drop, here are the #s of citations of all Fields medalists in the repo:
absolutely wild that Thurston has only 1 citation, and Yoccoz has none!
