Rowena Ball

I run the clockless household. Very liberating you all should try it. When the currawong calls I know I can go back to sleep. The magpie yodels me out of bed at dawn. Public transport is pretty much turn-up-and-go. Freedom from the grim chore of changing the car clock! Flights? Afternoon ones only.

Interesting. Damn good research on the complex, adaptive systems of biology and ecology is bringing the cane toad problem under control. Funny thing, I hear very similar language used wrt the 'unstoppable' march of AI: cannibalistic, parasitic, adaptive, evolving, all-consuming... Hmm, I wonder...

Inventive uses of iron lace on a #sydneyterracehouse!

The probability that a small perturbation on part of a network will grow and propagate, rather than die down harmlessly, increases with network connectivity and with the strength of connections, and that probability jumps dramatically the higher the number of nodes. Sydney Trains never learns.

The whole world in a signpost bedecked with melancholy lichens. Who among my comrades-in-woe will I meet at the end of Dismal Road?

'The operation was carried out for free under the hospital’s Saudi Conjoined Twins Program. The family sent the twins to Saudi Arabia after hospitals in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Mexico wanted large up-front payments.' Shame-job, Australia

These, on South Melbourne beach promenade, are more artistic looking.

Bert Flugelman’s Cones (1982) at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra caught my eye! The interplay of conical geometry, rotational symmetry, and specular reflection struck me. I took this photo on the gallery grounds, love how the conical forms catch the light. #mathsart #mathematics

Meanwhile, in Australia

Birman is a true icon (and a fellow Jewish woman mathematician from NYC). Her work inspired me to study braids, and continues to inspire me almost daily. This is my favorite clip of her: youtu.be/SKcx7T0VjgY An incredibly accomplished mathematician and a brilliant expositor 🪢 🧮

Control the cars they are really bloody annoying, I walk all over my university campus and the city and everywhere I go ragged traffic interrupts my peaceful meditative walkage. People driving big ugly metal boxes seem to think I'm the problem.

750 members! Rumours of the demise of human mathematics are very much exaggerated.

Freedom to sleep with windows open when the overnight temperature is minus 5 degrees C! Healthy and cosy. you all should try it. Most hotel rooms are insufferably claustrophobic in this respect.

Sydney Opera House after a heavy downpour

Understatement of the week: Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds describe receiving limited understanding from family and friends.

I will be giving the 2026 Moyal Medal Lecture today at 18:30 at the Macquarie University campus 👉🏼 www.mq.edu.au/faculty-of-s...

There are 3 left-spiral (sinistral) snails and 6 right-spiral (dextral) snails. Sinistral snails are rare and were called Kings. The setting is a Christian basilica, so... Chiral codes were used in Australian Indigenous societies too, centuries before chirality was 'discovered' by Western science.

Or you could just get the kids to make your flyer

What are they talking about, Bob Katter has lurked there for about 100 years

This organisation would be hugely strengthened by active inclusion of a greater diversity of global mathematics, mathematical cultures, and mathematicians. www.ahmath.org

Seems the Institute for Heritage and Human Mathematics that I founded in July at a conference I convened will be sited at Bundaberg. Mathematicians made redundant by AI and students will get day jobs picking strawberries and evenings make and disseminate human mathematics together. #mathsky

The Moon and Venus are dancing tonight.

The old answer to that old question was that mathematics is the part of physics where the experiments are cheap. So mathematics used to be good value. Now we hear that a mathematics experiment costs 22 million dollars. Ha! Maybe the roles are now reversed!

Get a life, ye AI losers. Give the real world a go. One student included "Samples of my conversations with Claude" in their honours thesis. *Honestly*. Gen-AI riddled grant applications and manuscripts to review and theses to mark and unsolicited CVs have become a torrential deluge. Heaven help us!

O happy AI-free afternoon! O the treasures at the Lifeline Bookfair! What a delightful swag to come home with! There are literally barns full of books, and crowds of families and kids and loners and oldies buying them. No-one here is crafting AI prompts. www.lifelinecanberra.org.au/books/bookfa...

And socks. Ohh those all-male 4th year and graduate maths and physics classes! They stink! Don't those dudes ever change their socks or wash their feet? Or wash anything? No wonder the women avoid or drop out.

AI is going to be one of the biggest issues in higher education in coming months. There is zero doubt vice-chancellors want to automate their teaching www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Excuse me, have we e-met? Ha! Thanks for the idea! To be deployed on all the whitesplainers, mansplainers, white supremacists, and the "I'm-not-a-mathematician-but-"s and other major and minor annoyances who spam my emails and msgs