Pinned toot

I'll be cleaning this up over the weeks to come, but in addition to looking for standard funding sources, I'm opening the tip jar.

I'm a math grad student, persistently cashflow-negative, trying to hold up the finances through my masters thesis before I can get into a phd (hence paid) position.

I plan to be more vocal with what I do, and contribute in other ways, but... Patronage of the sciences is a thing, right?

:cat on pogo stick: aha! aha! aha! CRT Does Not Do That! :bounces off again:

'is totally positive' returns True for values considered to be in complex fields even if the value is totally real and not totally positive. You must convert to the maximal real subfield first!

So what I have is something like

R = PolynomialRing(GF(2),'x')

Where in place of 'x' I want tau, with

K.<z> = CyclotomicField(29)
z = K.gen()
G = K.galois_group()
Gh = G.subgroup([g for g in G if g.order().divides(7)])
tau = Gh.gen(1)

After consuming several hours of documentation, I still have no idea how to construct a group ring. I can construct an ideal isomorphic to it, but I need it coerced back to the relevant finite module over the galois group because I need to apply a galois action from it.

Sage is /so/ much nicer than using PARI directly.

Kim Reece boosted

math as magic

In reply to twitter.com/CreeepyJoe/status/ I threaded a bit of what math is like in my head. Of course, the trick of it is, math /is/ magic, so there's no conversion necessary.

----

The lay folk were taught 'magic' in school, everyone had to learn it. But what they were taught was only patterns of symbols on a page. It looked exactly like magic .. without the magic in it.

Some few of them would realize what the symbols described, and in realizing it speak their true meaning with intent. Those symbols would then become so deeply a part of them that it would be hard to express their interaction with the world without invoking it.

They would see links and connections and patterns all around them, in everything these symbols described.

The difference in what this permitted them to do wouldn't be so obvious with the early symbols, but when somehow they passed exams without seeming to memorize it would become clear they had what was mistaken for a talent.

It wasn't talent, it was just that they had invoked the magic behind the symbols and taken it into themselves. Slowly as they became magicians, the world described by these symbols they acquired would fill in.

It become not just a bag of tricks, but a landscape of inter-relations and places and machines that operate on them to transform them into other things. The symbolic representations on the page were often, at that level, not even accurate any more.

Just a hopeful indication trying to drag the reader into this beautiful, powerful landscape and describe the machinery of it. New symbols could be made, and new machinery with the old ones; or the landscape explored.

But the magic had a certain fragility -- one symbol out of place and you could fall through into an abyss of confusion.

So magicians often spent a lot of their time moving, not in broad direct strokes, but in cautious circuitous patterns focused on making sure the ground was solid beneath them.

It took a lot of courage to take large steps, which more often than not landed one in the drink, but the great achievements such as new symbols that expand the entire possible landscape and its potential power...

Those always require daring to make large steps; then creating the circuitous landscape of detail to keep them from vanishing again back into the fog.

Actually performing magic, its actual practical mechanism? You'd just move ordinary things into an arrangement with a surprisingly thorough effect. But that arrangement would be determined by the patterns and mechanisms unseen, except to the magicians.

----

The hidden part here of course is that I meant it utterly literally .. a landscape, complete with topologies and metrics; algorithmic mechanisms and proof technique machinery. Tangible objects so abstract that they aren't possible to readily describe. Yet I assert, they are tangible.

it failed miserably btw. :P

Trying to install sagemath on my eink tablet. =) High hopes for sunny coding sessions.

Kim Reece boosted

IQ, pol?

it really upsets me that anyone can view IQ measures with any sort of validity and that it still has a presence in the world

it’s rooted in eugenics and is/has been utilized in basically every *ist form possible

Kim Reece boosted

-what does that even mean
-aircraft carriers are running Win98 so clearly lots of things are "military grade"
-If the US government said eating plutonium was bad I would Google it just to be super sure

"Some furry gave us 5 stars on their blog"
-A clear indicator of quality
-Furries make the internet go, an authority on technology
-Furries typically aren't feds
-I trust anyone 4chan hates
-idk they're fuzzy or something

sage has a latex() output function.

btw, i post on my hackers.town alt way more than here

A _year later_: In the same boat. Exactly the same boat.

Kim Reece boosted

The desire to pair-program a thesis so I quit wasting time on dead ends...

The thing I'd been working on (modulo covid lockdown delay) since February has finally given up the ghost and revealed its erroneous logic.

I'm as relieved as I am disappointed. My larger disappointment is that my methods for cross-checking proofs didn't reveal this error for so long.

"Letter to AMS Notices: Boycott collaboration with police"

I support this petition. It presents the issue with sufficient nuance to suggest oversight actions which could reduce bias, while pointing out misuse of 'scientific' basis to cover racism.

Signature on this or a similar petition, and follow-up on its principles, is an available direct action for mathematicians in recognizing the impact of our field on black lives and affirming that yes, .

Having encountered this one again recently,

The length of $$(i,1)$$ in $$\mathbb{C}^2$$ is $$\sqrt{2}$$ not 1 or 0. You must use the lengths, not the values, when applying Pythagoras.

Kim Reece boosted

Tonight I will...

Kim Reece boosted

I put the impossible antifa svg up again on the internets after it was requested. Link lasts 7 days.

Released under WTFPL
send.tresorit.com/a#-unWTdSiwl

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