Philipp Wacker

John Cleese threatening to become an immigrant in another country to escape immigrants in GB.

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One of my main pleasures in maths research is getting to draw colourful visualisations with Python and Inkscape. What use are papers if they aren't pretty to look at?

Philipp Wacker reposted

Christian Stöcker

@christianstoecker.de

Eine großartige, detaillierte Generalabrechnung mit der Politik von Katherina Reiche von Petra Pinzler, in 10 Punkten. Es ist glasklar, dass sie nicht die Interessen der Steuerzahler und Stromkunden vertritt - also auch nicht die der deutschen Wirtschaft. www.zeit.de/politik/...

"abbrechen" was right there

Philipp Wacker reposted

samuel mehr

@mehr.nz

this video of Chlöe Swarbrick, who leads the Greens in New Zealand's parliament, is worth your five minutes' time

I love playing Bayes Ball

Little acts of rebellion are what keep up my spirits

2 Sept

I'm starting to mourn the (anticipated) loss of a generation of creators, teachers, inventors, and all kinds of skilled people that will not choose their calling because GenAI has made them redundant (taking advantage of unpaid unattributed human labour that came before them).

I've been thinking recently about how indigenous ways of teaching and learning could point us towards how to solve the current crisis of mathematics. My reach on Bluesky isn't exactly great so I'm yelling this at the void, but I'll just put down my thoughts here, since it lets me organise them.

What I'm trying to understand better (and maybe you can help me here?) is: 1. How can we do a better job of creating community in our universities? and 2. The old system has one thing going for it: It produces (some) people who are excellent mathematicians. How do we retain this?

3. How do we change systematic incentives to reward pro-social work (reviewing, teaching, exposition, community building)?

I arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand a few years ago and have since learned a bit about the indigenous (Ao Māori) way of teaching and learning. Community and reciprocity is all over the place there: 1. The word "Ako" means both teaching and learning, and for good reason!

2. The Tuākana/Tēina (older sibling/younger sibling) idea pairs the more knowledgeable with the less experienced person so they can learn from each other. 3. The concept of Te Whāre Tapawhā teaches us that the wellbeing of our students is strongly dependent on many interconnected aspects.

I believe universities still have a major selling point: If you want, you can talk about fantastically cool subjects with people who are experts in the field. And this is so fun! Also you get to make new friends, and build career networks, and learn from others, as well as teach others.

But while we have always been providing this, maybe we have not done a great job at a) advertising this, and b) making these parts a more integral part of the university experience. In other words, we need to put the one thing front and center that we have (and GenAI does not): Community

The way we run maths courses has a hard time competing with that: We're often not really providing a lot more than (due to our human imperfection, and the reality of needing to teach a group of students rather than tutoring individuals) a slightly less targeted explanation of maths than ChatGPT.

At UC, we see attendance rates dropping even more than previously. A colleague of mine showed up to a classroom with 0 students attending, which has not happened ever before (according to my recollection). Are we still providing the right value proposition to our students?

There is another way in which GenAI hits mathematics, this time in the way we teach it (I'll focus on uni, since this is what I know best): Uni used to be the place where you got a marginally better exposition of maths than just reading textbooks at home (and these were scarce and hard to read).

Again, this has changed due to GenAI. I can get a tutorial on simplicial complexes, or monads, or differential forms with no effort at all. And since GenAI is stealing from the best textbooks, those explanations are actually quite good. And I can ask questions back! And check my work!

When I found a relevant paper, I looked at the authors' names, their home institutions, and I tried to find out whether they were connected to "my people"; whereas before AI I would have just read the paper to judge it. (I hate this so much!). The same applies to hiring PhD students:

I'm quite sure that, since we cannot trust submitted "test work" anymore, we will rely more than ever on recommendations from people we know. I probably don't need to spell actually this out, but obviously this cements the hegemony of existing researcher communities, by far male and western-centric.

As anyone involved with academic journals can attest to, the drought of mathematical results has now become a flood of slop. It has become trivial to produce something that resembles a paper without any training, and without any connection to the larger math community.

Isn't this great, you might ask? Aren't we knocking down barriers to accessibility in maths that way? I think the opposite is true: We cannot trust any written output anymore, so we fall back to our own networks for judging who's worth listening to. I have caught myself doing this:

course: Bill Thurston famously already said "The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves." Eugenia Cheng has written several books about how mathematics is a tool for understanding context, community, and society. In "A conversation on professional norms",

Emily Riehl has compiled excellent essays on how we could be doing so much better in our community. But the system is old, and large, so kept its momentum: In the age before GenAI, proofs were a scarcity, so it seemed to make sense to reward the proof generators with tenure and grants. This is over!

simonsfoundation.orgWatch: Fields Medalist Terence Tao on Artificial Intelligence and Why We Do MathWatch: Fields Medalist Terence Tao on Artificial Intelligence and Why We Do Math on Simons Foundation

Crisis, what crisis? Terry Tao has summarised some of the problems quite well (www.simonsfoundation.org/2026/08/13/f...), so I won't repeat them in too much detail, but essentially: Mathematics used to be about finding new proofs first, and the "proof generators" got the majority of the math fame.

There's a ton of mathematical work that is hugely beneficial (and maybe more important) to the community which is not rewarded at all (or at least not with shiny gold coins): Teaching, Community building, writing expositions and great explanations. People have pointed this out before already, of

23 Aug

Make a band bigger Metallicona

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21 Aug

I'm sure my kids enjoyed the brief typography lecture I gave them when they asked me what went wrong here

28 June

Reading The Joy Of Abstraction by Eugenia Cheng and I love this sentence: "The point of an equation is to use the sense in which two sides are the same to pivot between the senses in which they aren't."

28 June

"Problem solving is just a means to an end. The core payout of pure mathematics is the neuroplastic elevation of our worldview, and we can’t get there by copy-pasting the result." This really resonated with me.

Alice Schwarze@aliceschwarze.bsky.social

❤️

26 June

真可爱!

28 May

I took a book out from the library and unconsciously started skipping over whole pages, getting increasingly annoyed. At some point I reflected on what was making me do that and now I'm 99% sure the book is largely written by genAI. Completely unreadable garbage

visualpde.comInteractive simulation | VisualPDEAn interactive simulation of a partial differential equation, live in your browser with VisualPDE.

27 May

@visualpde.com Is such an awesome website. Explaining geometric Brownian motion in a lecture tomorrow, and this tool here will help me illustrate the corresponding forward Kolmogorov equation: visualpde.com/sim?mini=JOD...

20 May

How did I not know before that Schrödinger was a pedophile?

I'm just so proud of my students in my Random Processes class. I essentially told them "do something that is connected to probability and work on it in a group, I don't care what it is" (and gave them a list of possible ideas). They ended up doing so much cool stuff: Modelling Paper Scissors Rock

with a Markov chain, asking people to draw "a dot in a random location" on a piece of paper and studying whether the pattern was plausibly a Poisson point process, going (!) to a High School to teach the kids about Markov chains, learning about Bayesian inference in the context of

Polynesian voyaging, Coding and comparing Yahtzee bots and thinking about good strategies for playing, ... All that for an assignment that is just worth 15% of the final mark. So cool!

My library hold came through! Have been looking forward to reading The Edge of Space-Time by @chanda.blacksky.app for a long time!

6 May

Reading @miabirdsong.bsky.social's "How we show up" and it's just really fantastic. So many cool things I need to try out.

11 Mar

We are supposed to spell λ "Lamda"? My life is a lie!

9 Mar

Conservative parties and resulting governments are, like, just bad. This is true for every country that I've ever spent time in.

19 Feb

Excellent photo

14 Feb

Folks! Use the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font in LaTeX with \usepackage[sfdefault]{atkinson}. Helps your readers and looks gorgeous!

10 Feb

A surprisingly fun game to play with your kids on long car trips: Count up, but only numbers that you see on the way. A 1 on a number plate. A 2 on a phone number on an ad, a 3 on a bus stop. Gets trickier once you're in double digits and beyond.