Sebastian Forster @forster@mathstodon.xyz

“Very often research which has deeply interested me while I was investigating it loses its interest for me just after I have the solution, unhappily at a time which coincides with the period when I have to record it.”
— Hadamard (1949?)

my university started adding "[EXT]" to the subject lines of all emails outside the domain and it trashes subject lines when I write to mailing lists and it's so easy to forget to fix the subject line manually before sending arghhh

The toxic culture of rejection in computer science: https://sigbed.org/2022/08/22/the-toxic-culture-of-rejection-in-computer-science/, Edward Lee, via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32605494

I disagree with the post's preference for incrementalism over novelty, but I agree that there's big price for being too selective. Beyond frustrating everyone, I think it leads to dominance of trendiness and in-groups over significance, progress, originality, and depth. And though that may be good for those in the trendy in-groups, it's not good for the field.

Tip of the day: if you just want to browse some random, non-walled-garden web 1.0 sites, "BEST VIEWED IN IE4" is a good phrase to feed into the search engine.

#introduction so I can pin this

Hi, I'm Aen!

I'm 22, British-Indian, he/him, I live in the UK, and I am a Computer Science student, specifically going down the Networking path.

My other interests are Eurovision, reading (although I mainly read Sci-fi/Fantasy, I'm very open to exploring other genres), history, and talking to people here!

Avoid using #Doodle. There are privacy-friendly alternatives like

- https://terminplaner4.dfn.de/
- https://dud-poll.inf.tu-dresden.de/?lang=en

New draft book on lower bounds in complexity theory, by Demaine, Gasarch, and Hajiaghayi, intended as a replacement for Garey and Johnson's 1979 NP-completeness book: https://hardness.mit.edu/ via http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2022/08/computers-and-intractability-guide-to.html

I've often wondered why graph theorists don't use categories more. Maybe they're just not useful?

I'm not wondering about that anymore. This new article explains how the Categorical Graph Minor Conjecture would settle lots of interesting questions in graph theory!

(1/n)

Here's a story:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/aug/24/a-moment-that-changed-me-a-maths-puzzle-taught-me-to-use-my-brain-and-helped-me-cope-with-losing-my-daughter

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician.

Today is Dorothy Parker's birthday. I can only aspire to a fraction of her wit, but I'm probably good for a wisecrack or two. Or, you know, I could do some maths if you have something curious.

This is my #introduction .

I am Daniel, a citizen of the World, born in #Portugal . I am interested in numerical systems, programming, free operating systems, and making great stuff with free OSes and the Internet.

I like digital #privacy and secure communications. I make my digital choices, not based on popularity, and based on merit.

I also like sushi, ice cream, fruit, meditation, yoga, tea, dating and meeting new people ;-)

I post mostly in English, but also few times in Portuguese.

After many years of being annoyed by the default LaTeX support on Wordpress dot com, I finally found @christianp@twitter.com's MathJax plugin, along with "Better Search Replace" which together let me update 12 years of blog posts to use MathJax (and replace `$latex` with `$`)

The Computational Complexity blog takes on the question of the conference-based publishing culture in computer science, and whether in-person vs virtual vs hybrid conferences can really be said to be working, now that we have enough experience going back and forth between these modalities and the novelty of the virtual and hybrid formats has worn off: http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2022/08/conference-modality.html

Heute habe ich auf »meiner« PeerTube einen Vortrag entdeckt, von dem ich sage: Wenn du jemals den Ausdruck #AI/#KI/#KünstlicheIntelligenz benutzt hast oder benutzen willst, musst du ihn sehen:

Die Vergangenheit der Zukunft: 70 Jahre Künstliche Intelligenz https://digitalcourage.video/videos/watch/1c464828-a83e-4ff9-b264-197ba7968204

Change of topic, do people still use “Lemmata” (in a paper written in English) for the plural form of lemma?
I was told by two German mathematicians not to use it and just write “lemmas”, but also at least one other person doesn’t agree with this.

@jonny

I think about this a lot.

I wonder about what is the biggest "bang for your buck" in terms of giving people a feeling of liberation.

Is it configuration of their own computer to make it safer, running Firefox, or using a person VPN?

Is it writing a program? Maybe using a public API to make something cool and useful?

Is it doing something with hardware? Giving people the ability to make something with their own hands?

What do you think?

every time I teach programming I am reminded how far away from like 99% of everyone else's daily experience when we talk about digital liberation: most people I teach from scratch have never seen monospaced text, and the concept of a "syntax" as a structured series of characters is entirely novel. we fight a losing fight by losing sight of that while discussing the esoteric parts underneath, and we fight an exclusionary fight by supposing that's not important.