The Game Boy just turned 35. Fun fact: I recently dusted off my childhood console and to my amazement, some games still had my saved progress from decades ago! Turns out, old game cartridges used CR2024 batteries, which can last up to 40 years! Talk about built to last.

The Toeplitz Conjecture is one of my favorite open problems in mathematics. It's intellectually democratic; every single person in the world can understand it, even a 5-year-old or someone without any mathematical background. Yet, its solution hides tremendous complexity.

The trace of ChatGPT in arXiv papers

Every so often, I come across a Youtube video with a surprisingly high view count. The most recent one was a 2 hour lecture in French on optimal transport and Ricci curvature by Fields Medalist Cédric Villani with 3M views. There’s no shortage of Math lovers on the internet!

And God said let there be light...

Interesting how WW2 influenced the current distribution of Fields Medals among countries. The prize started in 1936 when many German mathematicians escaped the country or died. Post-war, Germany was not attractive to academics, who fled to universities in the US, UK, and France.

There's so much potential for a sci-fi movie starting with a mysterious traveler who arrives carrying a backpack full of books with weights

Testing ChatGPT on the really hard problems in life

I realized I went too far when my mom mentioned a billboard about a talent show and I focused on the fact that the correct way to generate a random point on a sphere is not to pick uniform θ in [0,2π) and φ in [0,π), but choose u and v in [0,1). Then φ = cos⁻¹(2v-1) θ = 2πu...

Every time I think about it, it never fails to amaze me.

Ironically, AI beating humans in the International Mathematical Olympiads would be the perfect conclusion to a trilogy of documentaries, beginning with Kasparov vs. Deep Blue and followed by AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol.

This reminds me of Large Language Models and how certain properties only emerge with scale
- GPT-1, 10⁸ parameters
- GPT-4, 10¹² parameters
it's hard to know if/when there's a phase change

Ilya Sutskever's papers were cited 85,616 times last year

Didn’t know there was a term for this

My favorite way of generating solutions to Einstein's Field Equations

A trick I've been using to avoid getting electric shocks when handling my macbook during airport security is touching it first with my keys before grabbing it - this will trigger a discharge spark away from my fingers.

My favorite paper clickbait 😅

For some reason, I always thought the Mars Curiosity Rover was way smaller than it actually is