Remember how the Ken Burns documentary would just show a battlefield map with a voiceover narration, interspersed with some paintings and woodcuts from the time period? That's because it respected you, the viewer, as an intelligent person with a genuine interest in history.

Vlad Tenev Harmonic The point at which there are no Erdos problems left is the point when all of the currently open problems in number theory (and many beyond) are solved. Two years seems ambitious for this.

It’s frustrating that coming up on the 30th Anniversary of Infinite Jest most of the commentary rehashes debates about elitism, obscurantism, and difficulty when the novel itself is the best argument for literary fiction as a democratizing pleasure with intellectual rewards.

Theorem: All prime numbers are odd. Proof: All prime numbers greater than 2 are odd, so 2 is the only even prime number. That’s pretty odd! Q.E.D.

Mathematicians 🤝AI researchers arxiv.org/abs/2601.22401. Our take on AI solving Erdos problems: * Many "Open" problems are actually just obscure: many cases the AI didn't find something new, only rediscovered solutions buried in the literature. We present our systematic approach

True believers rewarded

Use your hypotheses: 1. early --- to enhance the chance of proving your result then 2. late --- to see if you even need them

The thing about David Foster Wallace is that none of us will ever be as good as him. Not me, not you, not the angry guy who thinks it's cool to hate him. No one.

Lenovo has replaced the right control key on their otherwise-pretty-nice latest X1 Carbon (warranty replacement) with a copilot key. Fine. I won't begrudge some Microsoft PM "AI impact" in his self-review. But know what I do begrudge? The scancodes, plural. See, the copilot key

These are not hot takes! They are true! What you want to do is replace ‘conjecture’ or ‘hypothesis’ with hot take: The Riemann Hot Take The Twin Prime Hot Take The Continuum Hot Take etc.

It is awesome that Isaac Newton was far more known in his own time for being the Master of the Mint than for any of his scientific work Imagine if Jerome Powell had also discovered the theory of General Relativity, just as a casual side hobby in his spare time

Finally, after picking up this bit of real analysis a decade and a half ago, I got to teach sequence convergence the same way I learned it!

Daniel Litt People underrate “it will get harder to determine whether ‘novel discoveries’ by AI are truly novel or even true” and massively overrated “AI cannot make novel discoveries”

A proof enumerator in an infinite loop can make novel discoveries. Certainly something even a tiny bit smarter than that can.

“Clavicular is the human 67” You bolt awake in the mountains of Carthage. You are not online. It is 217 BC. You are the general Hannibal, and you have changed your mind. The future cannot come to pass. Rome must burn.

(52) has a product from n=2 to n whose body runs over m; the one line of LaTeX presumably left to the human physicists.

In the beginning the Universe was created. 
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

if your last math class was in a math Phd, then it's likely you aren't aware of 99.98% of mathematics