Jordan Ellenberg
@JSEllenberg
Followers
28K
Following
5K
Media
1K
Statuses
31K
Math professor at Wisconsin. Number enthusiast. Author of HOW NOT TO BE WRONG and SHAPE (May 2021)
Madison, WI
Joined January 2013
SHAPE, my "unreasonably entertaining" new book about geometry, is a New York Times bestseller and is available now!
36
27
319
It's actually not that much money when you split it between 7 billion people who don't have polio
RFK Jr and Robert De Niro offer $100,000 to anyone who can prove vaccines are safe
547
23K
48K
Apparently, Nazis have forgotten how powerful the Jews really are. Nine days from today, as a small reminder, we will blot out the sun.
446
7K
33K
OK I have created the funniest GPT-4 system setting: "You are an assistant who has a degree from Harvard, and wants to make sure everyone knows you went there, but will never mention it directly.".
86
812
21K
Gov. Evers, by vetoing the digits "20" and the hyphen from a reference to the 2024-25 academic year, has created an annual school funding increase authorization that persists for more than four hundred years.
164
1K
10K
I thought I drank a lot of coffee but I'm not even matching the 70 cups per day worldwide average.
500 billion cups of coffee are consumed every day worldwide: http://t.co/Bbh4kHTbF3.
64
368
7K
I'm pissed people are mocking this kid. She asks great questions, whose answers aren't obvious, and which math classes should address.
230
674
6K
Explained in class today that delta means a small positive number you choose and epsilon means a small positive number your enemy chooses.
64
541
6K
How much money did the Department of Defense lose this year?.
The USPS has lost at least $2.7 bln every year since 2007. The problem isn't corona; the problem is demand for mail has changed radically in 15 years while USPS hasn't. Any cash infusion must be conditioned on structural reforms that Congress has been punting on for 10+ years.
36
569
4K
Cool, now do the cost of not doing the stimulus package.
Romney: Total cost of Biden's coronavirus stimulus package is "pretty shocking"
30
460
4K
If you live in Florida,Texas,Ohio, Arizona,Georgia,Indiana, Tennessee, and you're not registered to vote, your deadline is TOMORROW: Mon, Oct 5.
27
2K
2K
It is bad but also objectively kind of hilarious that the governor of Wisconsin is accorded this power.
28
41
2K
Congratulations to mathematician Anna Kiesenhofer (partial differential equations) who won Olympic gold in cycling today!
17
352
2K
“Vaccinated people may spread delta as easily as unvaxxed” is like “Sober drivers may be as likely to die in a car crash as drunk drivers.”.
27
232
2K
A lot of people still think of millennials as college students but in fact they are the 36-year-old just-elected mayor of Wausau, WI.
4
249
1K
If you wanted to craft a policy to harm college students both American and foreign, U.S. public health, the U.S. taxpayer, U.S. global power, and world science, you almost could not do better than this.
This is bad. ICE just told students here on student visas that if their school is going online-only this fall, the students must depart the United States and cannot remain through the fall semester.
32
518
1K
Succession names: (Tom) Wambsgans is named for someone famous for eliminating three opponents at once:
25
207
1K
Loving the many quote tweets from people around the world who can’t believe Wisconsin is real.
15
32
1K
History twitter: man we’re exhausted from dunking on Dinesh D’Souza all the time, we need a break. Math twitter: on it.
And just like that, an 80 percent chance for Democratic takeover of the House goes to 50-50. Nate Silver’s polling operation can’t survive a second embarrassment of the magnitude he suffered in 2016.
9
135
971
The kid assumed the board was simply connected, rookie mistake.
17
23
1K
Nobody, not one person, is ready for the moment when Harris rolls out her VP choice and it's Tony Evers, jazzed as hell.
42
40
953
In case you're wondering why I retweeted a 7-year-old Forbes tweet it's because I found this same claim IN AN ACADEMIC PAPER.
3
18
1K
which cited a marketing report w same figure. Looks like there's an actual estimate of 500b cups PER YEAR which at some point got miscopied.
4
9
899
People with knowledge of math say "Please tell me they didn't blindly fit to a cubic and then extrapolate"
44
170
887
Biased ESPN is even worse, they run text during football games showing how many "points" they say each team has "scored." Not their call!
15
285
831
Tom Brady looks disappointed, somebody tell him he's making an extra $1.50 a week.
4
166
751
Jill Biden is a community college prof. I hope that helps us get a national higher-ed discussion that's not focused on a few dozen selective 4-year colleges.
11
78
789
Happy Erdős's birthday! Celebrate by taking the stimulant of your choice and inviting yourself over to somebody's house to do math.
14
377
802
I often use this example in undergrad teaching. “A shred of ear meat computes this integral, so can you”.
8
85
837
And somehow it gets repeated again and again despite making absolutely no sense.
7
6
769
You thought I was just dicking around on social media but I was Contributing To The Published Literature
8
33
736
Gonna announce I proved the Riemann Hypothesis and then hurriedly reveal I was referring to the Riemann Hypothesis Total Landscaping.
12
83
698
Explained to my daughter about .999. = 1. Her response: "My people will never agree to this, mathematician scum!".
18
64
713
You sent a kid dressed as a cop to go around demanding people's stuff, so I guess it's never too early to learn about civil asset forfeiture
I’m going to take half of Chloe’s candy tonight & give it to some kid who sat at home. It’s never to early to teach her about socialism.
6
147
608
So let me get this straight, if a book defines significance testing correctly there’s only an 11% chance it’s about psychology?.
89% of introduction to psychology textbooks define or explain significance testing incorrectly.
14
56
692
@benjaminwittes You should just email this guy once a week to say “gonads feel great, pray harder”.
36
11
537
Did this guy really just make a chart comparing an absolute number with a per-capita rate?
Here is a chart of American gun ownership and American murder rate. Please explain how more guns inevitably means more murder.
35
200
628
Don't see why he's so scared when according to the cubic model the pandemic ends this Friday
19
105
598
RIP John Conway. I asked him a lot of questions when I was a postdoc at Princeton and he always had a lengthy, deep, informative answer.
10
111
646
Am I confused or is this great news for US grad programs, US science, and US tech?.
From today, the majority of foreign university students cannot bring family members to the UK. In 2024, we’re already delivering for the British people.
40
44
652
@scottjshapiro A senior prof encouraged me to apply to his department. I was flattered. Then he said "We haven't filled the position because in the past we tried to hire people who were really good.".
3
28
620
No, you put the armor on the part of the dragon with FEWER crossbow holes in it.
14
76
586
As high school gets underway in more and more districts I just want to tell you all it's OK to have a radical in the denominator.
38
86
599
The guy who wrote this tweet got beat by Tony Evers in Green Bay, Chippewa Falls, Caledonia, Lodi, Pardeeville, Columbus, Portage, Wisconsin Dells, Prairie du Chien, Beaver Dam, Superior, Kenosha, Rhinelander, Brown Deer, Appleton, Wausau….
You guys are so stupid. Wisconsin is a purple state because of the Democrat votes packed in Madison and Milwaukee.
14
71
569
Mathematicians, train to be expert witnesses in the gerrymandering cases coming your way.
12
478
571
One last high school math mistake on her way out the door.
NEWS: Betsy DeVos has resigned, writing in a letter to the president: "There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me."
12
54
545
I sold more copies than this in my first week and my book contained several geometry proofs and the definition of eigenvalues
26
36
560
I tried this on one of my papers and it produced a male voice saying things like “elliptic curves are very important for cryptography” and a female voice that kept saying things like “whoa my brain hurts!” so make of that what you will.
1/ Recently got access to Google's Illuminate, which AI-generates a ~6min "podcast"-format summary of a research paper. To test it, I gave it 5 of my own recent papers. This thread summarizes the evaluation: ↵.
15
27
532
“Now imagine the collection of all things that are weird in this way, and think of this collection as itself being a thing.”.
11
37
516
Partial differential equations.
20
34
499
@MBarany She's been told "math is for high tech" & "math is from antiquity." She has the presence to notice and ask about the tension there. Fantastic!.
6
18
458
I walked by a hair salon called Julius Scissor and extremely disappointingly there isn't a wig store next door called Et Toupee, Brutus.
15
33
433
No! They are not! They are in complete agreement that the race is very close and even small changes could affect the outcome!.
The 538 and Nate Silver models are now basically opposites of one another.
17
13
470
I can't remember if I cried. When I read about his widowed bride. But something touched me deep inside. Vagenda of manocide.
6
123
384
Wisconsin GOP state senator Rob Cowles, a Republican who's represented his Green Bay area district for decades, is voting for Kamala Harris.
4
88
380
If you're a math grad student I just want you to know, tenured professors look up basic definitions on Wikipedia constantly.
If you are a new programmer I just want you to know . me and all of my colleagues with years of experience. Google the most basic things _daily_.
9
93
425
⊂ and ⊆ are synonymous.
In 5 words or less, start a fight without politics.
25
18
418
The new recording of Red is 2 hours long with tons of unreleased tracks added. You might even call it a … Taylor expansion.
6
56
405
A student just told me zero is positive in France. IS THIS TRUE??.
72
25
393
My talk with @lexfridman is up! This is LONG and goes very deep and covers a lot -- the Poincare conjecture, the Franco-Prussian war, the meaning of life, visualizing math, whether the real world is always simple, whether the universe is a mug, partnership between math and AI. .
Here's my conversation with Jordan Ellenberg (@JSEllenberg) about the mathematics of high-dimensional shapes and geometries.
18
33
394
Some news: my new book, SHAPE, comes out on May 25, 2021. You can preorder it now! .
22
40
387
I'm voting for Elizabeth Warren in the Wisconsin primary.
I’m voting for Elizabeth Warren in the Oregon primary.
9
42
319
I have a piece in the @washingtonpost today: math is hard and we should tell our students the truth about it.
27
93
363
Congratulations to Moon Duchin, the first mathematician in US history to be mentioned 46 times in a Supreme Court decision.
7
53
347
Today is my 50th birthday. And today I arrived in my 50th state!
35
1
342
I have a homological algebra joke but it fell flat.
I have a statistics joke but the average person would think it’s mean.
52
42
341
To be clear: if you are an optimist about this disease YOU HAD BETTER HOPE there are tons of asymptomatic cases.
7
48
296
brb getting "unreasonably entertaining" tattooed on my forehead
9
19
358
Social-emotional learning in math textbooks is not new.
15
40
354
Props to Nate here. It would have been easy to give in to vibenalysis. But "I have no idea" is an accurate representation of the state of rational knowledge right now, and he's right to say so.
It's published. We ran 80,000 simulations tonight. Harris won in 40,012.
13
5
356
Just teaching my daughter some python, how’s your homeschooling going?
16
31
331
Very cool topology video showing that what the "holes" in a 2-holed surface are is not entirely clear.
🤯 Topological Logic - a rod through one hole of a double torus can pass through both with some careful stretching of the surface. No tearing or pinching required. A fantastic video made by math professor Dave Richeson @divbyzero
5
65
336
brb whipping myself into a bayesian froth about how gauss was mid.
13
20
331
Heads up, Wisconsin geometry teachers: the state legislature has outlawed use of the word "intersection" in class.
29
70
309
I try to treat each day as a gift: something I didn't ask for and that I now have to figure out what to do with.
2
69
308
I checked whether what David Brooks says about colleges here is true, and it's not.
17
78
298
Peter Scholze reports on astonishing progress in computer formalization of mathematical proofs.
5
60
336
This game is just gonna come down to who can Badger harder.
0
69
319
If you liked the tweet you might like my book in which I write about GPT and mention I went to Harvard
2
3
329
People need to grasp that a big part of civility is not lying.
6
79
269
Don't get what the big deal is, on average 73.9% of U.S. presidents have been convicted of a felony.
6
16
315
Think I'm gonna rent space next to campus and open up a shop called "University Sweatshirt Store" but it only sells books.
11
15
303
A big part of my writing process is to write a sentence that starts with “Indeed” and then delete the “Indeed.”.
17
16
308
Your quarantine h-index is the largest h such that you've been h miles from home h times since April 1. I think mine is 5.
53
42
310
The thing is, God is generally on math's side.
Trump adviser: "Math isn't on our side. We need an act of God to alter the course.”.
7
26
295
Proposed rule for journalism: if you report an average, compute the median. If median is less than half of average, you must report both.
14
114
294
And she said the Imperial group has scaled back its death estimates; that's just not right.
12
80
254