Michael Barany

I wrote a little essay in honor of my dad's retirement, "Reading Between the Lines in the Barany Lab" (open access) doi.org/10.1007/s109...

Bad news! The Faculty has rejected the budget request for the hoovers! When I write my campus novel people are going to find it too unbelievable to buy.

The scandal of an overpaid Principal at Edinburgh University setting in motion a "vampiric" programme of job cuts gets even worse. Investigative reporting from the journalists of The Ferret highlights Principal Peter Mathieson's murky second job: www.theferret.scot/peter-mathie...

I've collected some things I've written down over the last while about culture in mathematics. Feels like a good night to post them. Notes on Math Culture www.peter-keep.com/2026-10-24-m...

I always remember it as spring into savings! fall out of savings :( what that implies for clock adjustment is anyone's guess

🌍 The latest issue of the BJHS is out! Guest-edited by Matthias Heymann and Dania Achermann, this special issue explores the epistemology and politics of climate science through 6 historical case studies. bshs.org.uk/bjhs-septemb... Stay tuned for our spotlight posts!

How well I explain the Greek system of tense and aspect (very well thanks for asking) has a lot less influence on completion rates than how many hours of part time work my students are or are not juggling, for example.

Right. I feel it needs to be said that although LLMs are playing a key role here, it’s *people* who are choosing to take the ideas of other mathematicians. It’s a complete breakdown of our discipline’s norms of behaviour, in just a year. Yes, there was always the occasional dishonest thief. But…

Prospective grad students, please take heed: you don't need to have read the scholar's work to write them an email. But if you use AI to write your email and pretend to have read their work, the false notes will almost surely be picked up and you will be setting your chances on fire

To reflect on how this plays out in mathematics: Editing, especially by a senior coauthor, should include re-thinking the content at a technical level and not just polishing tone. E.g. adjusting lemmas to the minimal hypotheses to show *why* they are true.

I can understand general public ignorance about the role of universities, but what has been truly shocking in recent years is the extent to which the leaders of many universities no longer seem to understand their role and casually talk about research and teaching as two very different things.

In this explosive follow up to the story about the American Historical Association's use of DC lobbyists to silence AHA member Palestine advocacy, we have this: AHA is conducting a witchhunt of its Council. Loyalty oaths. Lawyers. Threats. Authoritarian behavior. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

The business school is one of the sources of the ideologies and practices of governance that facilitate the dismantling of democracy within the broader institution of the university in which it sits.

come for the dunking on case studies, stay for the dunking on case studies

I am hiring a postdoc for four years to work with a fantastic technical + humanistic team on this SNSF funded project on AI and interpretation: contralab.online/philology . If you can work on LLM interpretability/explanability, see contralab.online/job ...

No, the work they do is not necessarily the same as the work of the small number of people you always quote. That's the point. It's not mathematics itself that's threatened. It's a certain way of doing it. You could try to look beyond that.

They find something they care about, and work on that in the little time they have, and teach a new generation of mathematicians in the process. Why don't you interview them about how they do it and why they have not given up on the profession and why they don't break down and cry about it.

Short thread asking @nytimes.com and other MSM to stop interviewing the same small handful of people every time something math-related comes up. Mathematicians are dismayed when AI scoops them on the results? How about look for advice from someone familiar with getting scooped and outpowered.

wrote about what a drag it is to take a piss in public for @thebaffler.com thebaffler.com/latest/go-pi...

as, *ahem*, one of the referees for this book, excited to see how the final text turned out and can already strongly recommend based on the version I got to read!

as, *ahem*, one of the referees for this book, excited to see how the final text turned out and can already strongly recommend based on the version I got to read!

It's publication day!! The Open Access version apparently needs another 24-48 hours to go live; I'll update with a direct link when it's available. If you prefer paper copies, however, you can order yours today!

Bonus points: it works for all research areas, not only maths!

Recommendations from the Journals Working Group of the Association for Human Mathematics just dropped: Venues that disseminate scientific publications should give authors *choice* and *consent* in whether and how LLM-based systems are used during the referee process. www.ahmath.org/recommendati...

same consultants, same awful playbook at our uni :(

This is a very disturbing read by Philip Moriarty about the corporate consultants at University of Nottingham, whose "bloodless prime-LLM-grade corporate boilerplate" called Future Nottingham 2 is guiding decision-making - cuts, cuts and more cuts. muircheartblog.wpcomstaging.com/2026/10/07/j...

it should still remain a problem

just in case you've been waiting for a decent discount to get your mathpig mug/shirt/apron/stickers/phonecase/etc, there's a sale on this week https://www.redbubble.com/people/mbarany/shop?collections=579249

just in case you've been waiting for a decent discount to get your mathpig mug/shirt/apron/stickers/phonecase/etc, there's a sale on this week www.redbubble.com/people/mbara...

lol arxiv.org/abs/2610.08144

The Association for Human Mathematics (AHM) statement on OpenAI’s October 6 release of mathematical documents just dropped! www.ahmath.org/statements

RIP Margaret Hamilton, the brilliant computer scientist whose contributions to software for the Apollo Guidance Computer were absolutely crucial to the Apollo Moon landings. She also helped shape the discipline of computer engineering while at MIT's Instrumentation Lab: news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

mathematicians really having their Torment Nexus moment

Behind all the arguments about the value of formalisation and capitalised Truth, I think it's as simple as this: how do we respond to a bully? It's a long time since I was in school, but I don't recall that adoring the bully and hoping they'd be nice to me ever paid off.