Knots and Narnias, https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2018/08/16/knots-and-narnias/
Riffing on a video of a Bill Thurston lecture, Jim Propp explains that when a portal to another dimension has a knotted boundary, it can actually be a portal to several other dimensions.
Sensitivity Conjecture resolved
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4229
RT @typer_uma@twitter.com
Type-checking the session-typed pi-calculus in Coq (master's thesis)
https://github.com/umazalakain/session-types-coq/blob/master/src/SessionTypes.v
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/typer_uma/status/1154483968785440771
Oh my god, this made my evening
Source: https://medium.com/alacris/what-do-formal-methods-actually-guarantee-d94ae8802be2
Super Mario 64 has been decompiled, in its entirety, basically by hand (writing code until it compiles into the right binary) https://gbatemp.net/threads/super-mario-64-has-been-decompiled.542918/
Chinese scientists guilty of ‘researching while Asian’ in Trump’s America: https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3016267/chinese-scientists-guilty-researching-while
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20319936
The story focuses on star cancer researcher Xifeng Wu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xifeng_Wu), forced to resign from the University of Texas, apparently because she fostered collaboration with Chinese cancer research institutions at the behest of her higher administration.
See also "The U.S. Is Purging Chinese Cancer Researchers From Top Institutions", https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-06-13/the-u-s-is-purging-chinese-americans-from-top-cancer-research
bunposting
@lynnesbian what do u even need 2 hold
University of Strathclyde proposes to axe combinatorics and their three strong combinatorics faculty members: https://cameroncounts.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/combinatorics-at-strathclyde/
via https://gowers.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/the-fate-of-combinatorics-at-strathclyde/
This comes despite the group being both strong in research and important in undergraduate education. The apparent cause is Strathclyde's placement of combinatorics in computer science rather than in mathematics and in their use of standards aimed more at computer science than mathematics (like bringing in large grants).
Integer linear programming, change-making, and Presburger arithmetic: https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2019/03/22/danny-nguyen-and-igor-pak-presburger-arithmetic-problem-solved/
Integer arithmetic problems with O(1) variables and one level of quantifiers (example: given O(1) coin types, find the largest amount of money for which you cannot make change) have long been known to be polynomially solvable, but in FOCS 2017 Nguyen and Pak proved that only two levels of quantifiers make the problem hard. See also review https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr=3734216 and paper http://www.math.ucla.edu/~pak/papers/hard_presburger3.pdf
Some company is advertising by handing out USBs that look like thumb drives, but actually act as keyboards and open the company's webpage on any OS, sometimes by using the windows run dialog. This has given the attack vector more publicity and hopefully will remind people not to plug in random USBs they find. https://v.redd.it/6aygvuaqdq431
If you're interested in the game of Hex, Matthew Seymour's online strategy book is the best one-stop guide to practical play that I know of (and it's not too easy to stumble across):
http://www.mseymour.ca/hex_book/hexstrat.html
they/them. undergrad - type theory, software verification, category theory, cryptography, topology.