Steve McCormick
@Quasilocal
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Sweden-based, Germany-adjacent, Scottish-Australian Mathematician. Geometric analyst who pretends to be a physicist sometimes.
Luleå
Joined February 2013
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Some thoughts on the struggles of mathematicians to keep our blackboard lecture theatres against myopic pushes to remove them (🧵) :
Fundamentally, I believe that the disagreement comes from a misunderstanding of their purpose. The people pushing to remove them seem to (1/N)
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You are correct.
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Sorry mathematicians, it seems if you extend it a little more this new tiling doesn't work
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Based on the data collected, my tennis ball will reach orbit by tomorrow
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Me: LaTeX is great because everything just is formatted perfectly without ever having to think about it!
Also me: \vspace{-2.37mm}
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"We have carefully included the thoughtful suggestions of reviewer 2"
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People who studied math: I find programming so easy to pick up quickly
People who studied programming: I can't do math at all so you don't need it for programming
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"And then we just cancel this infinity with that one and we get the answer"
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Math is not special.
Like any skill, everyone can learn it if they put in the effort. Like playing basketball, guitar, or anything else that takes practice. Math is not special.
If you struggle with it, take comfort in the fact that everyone struggles with it. 🧵
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I just heard a PhD student say "I just need to get through one more week and then things will be less busy..."
I didn't have the heart to say anything
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One more, in case anyone is wondering how to make these :)
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A public service announcement that has absolutely no connection to anything I may or may not have recently done:
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"What's your degree in?"
"Pure mathematics"
*awkward and uncomfortable silence for the rest of the 14 hour flight*
“What’s your degree in?”
“Geography.”
“Oh. So, you, like, memorize capitals?”
“No, that was my classmate. I do rivers, in order from shortest to longest.”
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"and now that we've proven the *existence* of a solution, our work is here done"
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Me: "Mathematics is like a game of chess, where some simple and elegant rules come together to create a wonderful and complex puzzle"
Physicists:
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What the fuck is this
it's actually crazy how much better triangle notation is than the standard notation
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Fun fact: Einstein never said this at all.
On the other hand, Feynman who is often heralded as a good communicator, once quipped that if he could explain what he got the Nobel Prize for to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Albert Einstein.
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Everyone when being taught math: "when will we ever need to know about exponential functions in the real world?"
Later: "we only have 500 cases of the coronavirus in the whole country, that's nothing!"
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I'll never forget that time I couldn't access my own (paid for) open access paper because Elsevier blocked all Swedish institutions as a fee negotiation technique
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The toilets at the Erwin Schrödinger Institute in Vienna
There is a concept known as “thin places”, where it is said that the veil between this world and the next is thin. You can sense the numinous around you, even if you cannot describe it.
Where have you been that felt ‘thin’?
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What happens when inequality rises? It turns out that murders go up.
Hmm .. maybe inequality really is structural violence.
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Doesn't it just totally wreck your brain knowing that both quantum mechanics and general relativity describe the world exceptionally well, yet are incompatible
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Me, cancelling out two divergent integrals in a current paper:
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b^2-4ac:
Numbers do not discriminate, and neither should we.
Mathematics is for everyone.
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"Oh cool, you're in research? Your lab must be so busy! What does a typical day of research look like?"
Mathematicians:
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String theorists:
Mathematicians need a proof to verify whether a result is correct. Physicists need a measurement.
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PSA: There's a website and app that lets you draw symbols and it will tell you the closest LaTeX syntax for it:
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Lol these lecture notes are the gift that keeps on giving. The same quote in a math textbook (top) and more engineering focused notes (bottom)
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You can make any data look fun and happy if you plot it like an xkcd comic
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Ever wonder what the rest of the zeroes of the Riemann Zeta function look like?
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This notation
what thing in academia would you like to make illegal?
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I detest this fake quote, because makes people feel stupid for not being able to explain something in 5 minutes, despite it taking them 5 years to learn.
If you can't explain it simply, it's probably because it's complex and took you a lot of hard work to learn. Well done, you!
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The intermediate value theorem is one of those theorems in math where, when you first learn it, it appears so mind-numbingly obvious that you can't help think, why the fuck is this overcomplicated into a theorem?
And then you slowly come to appreciate it later... 🧵
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@howie_hua
Pairwise comparison probably:
- A eliminates C
- B eliminates D
- B eliminates A
B wins. (But in a pressure situation like this in real life, I'd probably second guess myself a couple of times 😅 )
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Universities: "we need three written quotes from different authorised companies to ensure you choose the cheapest office chair"
Also universities: "Sure 10 grand sounds reasonable to publish a paper"
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What?! That can't be right! This circle basically just contains New Zealand, Antarctica, and nothing else...
More people live inside the red circle than outside of it
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I challenge anyone to show me a product more beautifully designed or enjoyable to use.
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Lol good luck
One of the things that neither the stem nor humanities side in the great debate here wants to acknowledge is the fact that being able to read dense text relatively quickly is actually a fairly specialized skill that is trained in the humanities
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Let's talk about some of the Tayloring and choices in this photo, and how you can avoid making the same mistakes.
Let's talk about some of the tailoring and choices in this photo, and how you can avoid making the same mistakes. 🧵
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Kids in school: "I don't care about math. When will I ever need to know this?!"
48,800 of those same kids as adults:
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I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I don't want those people lost underwater to die an unimaginably terrifying death
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@jpeskyy
Well that's what I said too.
But definitely not because of the distance. That's almost the exact same distance from my place to Stockholm (both in Sweden).
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Plea to scientists and teachers:
Stop perpetuating the idea that math is a necessary evil.
You know how people learn and retain things better if they want to learn it? What effect you think the ultra-pervasive trope that "nobody likes math but you gotta do it" has? (1/2)
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I would like to apologise for misrepresenting physicists with yesterday's meme. It has been rightfully brought to my attention that physicists would never expand a Taylor series past the second order
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Math peeps, save me thinking for myself.
A student asked me yeaterday: What *is* a convolution actually?
I really didn't have an answer that I'm satisfied with, so I'm putting it to twitter. Whatcha got?
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Regardless of whether or not this is ChatGPT, it's a gross violation of trust to publicly post stuff from students, prospective or otherwise, for clout.
To all prospective PhD students of the world:
If you generate your research statement using chatGPT, your grade will be 0, and you will not be invited to the interview.
So, please save your and the committee's time.
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Kinda disappointed that a thread managed to get over 1000 people to 'like' curvature is totally incorrect :/
Jonathan touches on some important things in differential geometry, but what he seems to mean is essentially the notion of how to define a surface *before* you... (1/N)
What actually *is* curvature? It's a surprisingly hard question, and one which wasn't satisfactorily answered until the early 20th century, thanks to the work of Tullio Levi-Civita, Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro and other (largely Italian) differential geometers. (1/9)
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Suck it physicists, math stole half of your prize this year
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How do PhD students living abroad make friends outside the lab?
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Lol they called Anne L'Huillier during her lecture, so finally on the 4th time she answered during a brief break. Apparently the second half of the lecture was a challenge 😅
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Spend 2 years working on a paper that is read by 2 reviewers, one grad student, and my mum might lie and say she looked at it briefly too.
Spend 4 seconds tweeting about LaTeX and it's got 1500+ likes and 250 retweets...
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The wildest thing about the public perception of mathematics is the idea that it's all about numbers and calculations
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"After the 3rd revision, we now believe all of the reviewer's comments have been addressed"
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No modern technology will ever blow my mind as much as a bicycle wheel on a string
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