😕 I was asked to review a paper for a journal so they created a reviewer account for me on their online manuscript handling system. They conveniently gave me the very natural and simple username Kontoyiannis-81768c27-feca-4749-8e19-ded8327frt71 No, that was not the password, it was the username!

Beautiful 67,800 year-old art

😋 A bit of fun with entropy! "Shakespeare, Entropy and Educated Monkeys"⁉️ Full paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2512.11880

What will happen to international academic conferences in the U.S.?

Nicely said <3

And so is started. It is by now clear to everyone that academic publishing as we know it is about to change forever. It is not yet clear what form the future will take, but the the academic publishing world will be soon become different to anything we know... 👇

Herman Rubin's *Commandments* for Statistical Consulting! statistics.stanford.edu/history/herm...

Retirement is celebrated everywhere except by academics and supreme court justices, who view it as capitulation

❕ Fun new work with Andreas Theocharous and Lampros Gavalakis on *Data Compression* 👨‍💻 🗜️ Full paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2501.101...

Great talk by Amos Lapidoth at @robinsoncollege.bsky.social Robinson College, University of Cambridge!

Spineless and disappointing

🚨 Very excited about this! Among other things, we give the first complete characterization of the case of equality in Shannon's Entropy Power Inequality Full paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2509.14021

If Elon Musk is *not* removed from the Fellowship, the Royal Society should explain why it even has a Code of Conduct.

One of the most-viewed PNAS articles in the last week is “An information-theoretic foreshadowing of mathematicians’ sudden insights.” Explore the article here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... For more trending articles, visit ow.ly/Me2U50SkLRZ.

Not saying I loved it, but a popular-science introduction to Markov chains that gets nearly 8 million views in six weeks is definitely something to celebrate!

ICYMI: Terry Tao on Trump's science policy 👇

🚨 Is fixed step-size a good idea? A rigorous analysis, in exciting new work with Sean Meyn (@supermeyn.bsky.social) and Caio Kalil Lauand

🙋‍♂️❓ When did Google search stop saying how many results it found, and is it still possible to get that info?

🚨 New paper -- Causal modeling and the curse of overfitting

UK vs the US: Cultural and lifestyle differences

"Almost 84,000 people died in Gaza between October 2023 and early January 2025 as a result of the Hamas–Israel war" "More than half of the people killed were women aged 18–64, children or people over 65"

the ERC has added a million euro for researchers moving to Europe.

New entropy inequalities -- Fun new work with Rupert Li and Lampros Gavalakis just posted www.arxiv.org/abs/2506.20813 !

🚨 Breaking -- and extremely exciting -- news! It was just announced that Frans Willem was awarded the Shannon Award! Congratulations, Frans!

In auto-reply/vacation messages that say "...if there is something urgent, please contact Blah at blah@blah...", has anyone ever urgently contacted Blah?

Hard to see how this may not be a problem 😮❗

Obit for Peter Lax, an applied mathematician who did pioneering work in PDEs, solitons, and computational science. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/s...

Exciting talk by Frank den Hollander at the Athens Probability Colloquium AProC.gr

What if we actually succeed in building AGI? A very evocative lecture: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Tom Kurtz passed away a few weeks ago. I just heard the very sad news today. He was a wonderful guy, and his work had a great impact on probability theory. www.gundersonfh.com/obituaries/T...

Final remider -- happening this week!

🚨 2025 Rollo Davidson Prizes announced!

And so it begins

If you are in the UK or not too far from the UK, join us! Registration is free forms.gle/Lre8eFuQ8dVD... Meeting web page lsit2025.eng.cam.ac.uk

🔥 A bit of a hot take: John Nash's Ph.D. thesis introducing game theory was 26 pages. Shannon's 1948 paper introducing information theory was 55 pages. Stop complaining about page limits!

The ultimate Royal cop-out. Why, then, does the Royal Society have a Code of Conduct at all? www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Masaki Kashiwara is the first Japanese person to be awarded the most prestigious prize in mathematics https://go.nature.com/4l4cy7f

Normalization of math phobia for basic subjects is irresponsible, @nytgames.bsky.social. In most modern societies a lack of basic math skills is seen as an embarrassment. Sadly we have a crisis in the quality of math education in this country, next time try helping.

😮 I really should stop getting surprised by news like this, but I still get shocked 📚🦹‍♂️

🩳This appeared in my 📩 inbox today

They're called public records for a reason. Starting today, WIRED will *stop paywalling* articles that are primarily based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, becoming the first publication to partner with @freedom.press to offer this for our new coverage.

Reframing what we thought we knew about human evolution? Sounds like a job for a couple of Darwinians... www.cam.ac.uk/research/new...

It seems US universities along with all major US research institutions currently under attack by the Trump administration cannot even hope to look to the Democratic party for help.

@supermeyn.bsky.social is kicking off the eighth C^3 Workshop, aka the Cognition & Control Workshop, in the Reitz Union Chamber. Two days of discussion about control and cognition, including information theory and statistical learning. Mindbending stuff. lnkd.in/giUjHu7e

My piece in @thenation.com. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

We’re celebrating #InternationalWomensDay early by shining a spotlight on some of the incredible women who have shaped the world of mathematics! 💡✨ Learn more about their contributions and impact:

The groundbreaking discoveries of these five pioneering women in science shaped our understanding of the ocean, mathematics, medicine, physics and animal behavior.

“We believe this rush to comply is a sign that universities are willing to become an institutional wing of the new segregationists.” www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

“We have to attack the universities… professors are the enemy.” #NIH funds universities. Jay Bhattacharya believes what Vance says here too. Bhattacharya was chosen by Trump because he would attack universities. Scientists must oppose Bhattacharya’s confirmation, and there is not much time left.

Reuters has a live feed from Athens' main square where thousands of protesters have gathered since 10.30 a.m. (though the official time was 11). The speaker is reading the names of the 57 dead, most of whom were university students #Τεμπη #Tempe www.youtube.com/watch?v=34-K...