Paul Johnson

Prints of some of my Power Lines Drawings are for sale at my store for $40 each marcusmerritt.bigcartel.com/category/pow...

Song for the morning after the time change: Mehldau and Thile covering Welch's Scarlet Town: But the man who knows what time it is is knocking at the door. youtu.be/yEVnOgtJSY0?...

Compare and contrast: Jackson, closing track of Lucinda Williams's Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Glenn Campbell's megahit. I like Joshua Redman's recent Dover: youtu.be/zuUF8tniPdA?...

AI art does nothing for me to begin with, but AI art in an essay contributing to the AI in maths debate seems at best counterproductive and an AI generated likeness of an "AI vegans" seems almost intentionally provocative? From the pdf version of: proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/21/m... Scholze and ?

Tevelev on OpenAI's Nagata proof. Last paragraph about support from the AI companies feels overly dreaming and naive to me. I'm thinking about all Google's projects (reader) that it supports for the community but then dropped. I also think a crash is coming, draining those financial resources.

Who are these abstract, grand sounding slogans for? Does every UK Uni have one (or two or three?) Two short parallel/contradicting phrases is....exactly what the Sheffield slogans are like "Independent thinking. Shared ambition." (Shared by who?) "When you engage, we enrich."

A good friend, a very serious algebraic geometer, is having his work from the past decade swooped upon by a person with AI; said person is pushing out AI-generated proofs of the parts my friend exposed to the world. Fortunately not everything was revealed, but this is utterly gross. #MathSky #LLM

7am: it has started. Here we go again! #USyd #strike #Education nsw.nteu.au/news/univers...

you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and the other, without the slightest warning

I was confused why I wasn't getting my percentile score today until I saw a PHO announcement a little farther down...

For y’all algebraic geometers, a new paper by Anschütz, Le Bras, Rodríguez Camargo & Scholze just dropped, including a strong AI statement. arxiv.org/abs/2610.27918 (via #AHM)

UK universities devising generic 'skills' modules

Sharing this poem again tonight in light of the terrible news that Douglas Dunn has died. A huge loss for U.K. poetry...

1/3 Higher education in the UK is at a critical juncture. Universities make a substantial contribution to society and the economy, but the system faces mounting pressures, and too many difficult questions remain unresolved. Today we launch a new policy programme, to tackle that shorturl.at/079yt

I knew what the second shot would say as soon as I saw the first one was Holst's The Planets 😭

The Goldsmiths dispute is now the longest strike in the history of the university sector. Wish us solidarity, we are not standing down in the face of redundancies.

I keep coming back to this from Tressie. Austerity as a tool to create corporate universities.

from arxiv:2610.22123

We found that the most gendered experience wasn’t work-life balance, the focus of most retention efforts. It was feeling devalued, in formal evaluations, but particularly in everyday interactions. Unlike every other topic, the gender gap in devaluation was larger among more senior faculty.

Amazing. (I am finally finishing the paper where I extend the work of those generating functions pretending to be a man to orbifolds.)

Man in a gilet stood on platform 12 gives up on reading the display and asks ChatGPT out loud if he is on the right platform for his train. I don’t want to be dramatic about it but Eratosthenes figured out the circumference of the Earth using a stick and knowledge of a distant well.

Too many people are calling on the community to "change how we value papers". Not enough people are posting "this is what we look for in our next hiring round".

Ford Focus 😶‍🌫️

A mistake in a calculation years ago made me think the proof for nonabelian G was going to be way harder but yesterday I redid it and the proof just works how you'd hope! And I get to spend half of today talking to combinatorics students one on one

I don't regret the time I took to watch this, and it's reminded me that I want to reread Life: A User's Manual.

In case you’re wondering why I’ve been posting about inappropriate relationships between students and staff, the news about this case of a mathematician is now reaching across the media … vinnews.com/2026/10/01/h...

This feels a bit like the school-level insistence on using the triple lines for identities instead of talking about equality of *functions*.

never the wrong time for this classic

In about 1940 Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo moved in to an apartment on Santa Fe and Ecuador. Their friend Jorge Luis Borges came for dinner. He came for dinner every night for about 20 years. After dinner, Borges and Bioy retired to Bioy's study and talked and wrote until the early hours.

Hmmm. I'm happy with 3 against 4 and 3 against 5 polyrhythms, but I should probably master 4 against 5 before trying to play 3 against 4 against 5 all at once.

So Alpöge's complex structure on S^6 was a 100 page paper 40 days ago and then today there's a 100 page paper on the arXiv proving properties about it? I'm exhausted just contemplating it.

"Ask yourself rather what is the mathematics that lives only inside you and nowhere else. The one that makes you dream, like the music that no-one has ever heard, that wakes you up in the middle of the night, playing itself inside your head, and demanding to be written."

The turn against Turnitin in UK HE is gaining momentum, with Cambridge U the latest to cancel its contract over its proposal to use student essays to train AI. I imagine more unis will now follow. TII will surely be going into crisis management now. Good piece on it here wonkhe.com/blogs/a-supp...

I'm on strike for the next five weeks with @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social because management continues to threaten mass compulsory redundancies. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Today, staff @ University of #Edinburgh are striking to protest recently announced cuts - incl. the forced closure of >90 courses. Principal Prof Sir Peter Mathieson accused the union of "weaponising" students. I find this enraging, so: a short (quite personal) thread. www.bbc.com/news/article...

cries in 400 jobs threatened at my one (1) small (tiny!) university as part of sector-wide crisis

Sorry to double-post – I find this plot clearer. Start of February is apparently when Claude Opus 4.6 was released by Anthropic, and ChatGPT-5.3-Codex was released by OpenAI. The next big release after that was GPT-5.4 by OpenAI at beginning of March.

It *feels* like the daily arXiv submission numbers are getting oppressively huge and I just checked arxiv.org/stats/monthl... and yuuuuuuuuup. Also note the pandemic.