Things are all pear-shapes, and yet, I got some bunny paper clips along with my order of whiteboard marker refills, and that sparks joy.

"There are lots of problems in mathematics that are interesting but have not been solved, and every time you solve one you think up a new one. Mathematics, therefore, is something that expands rather than contracts." – Mary Ellen Rudin (1924– 2013) #quote #mathematics #problems #maths #math

On the AC Transit to Berkeley for day 3 of Developments in Modern Methods for Linear Algebra... aka DMML, aka happy 70th to my PhD advisor, Jim Demmel. Realized that I am now the same age he was about halfway through my PhD years...

gender norms admit the existence of gender metrics which can be abstracted to gender topologies which, here, we categorify into gender locales, also known as pointless genders

In a day of wtf nat'l news moments (again!), I also know: - Today was AppleFest in Ithaca! And yesterday, and tomorrow. - K1 is out enjoying a concert, and has been noodling around on his guitar all week. - K2 just got back from playing basketball and is heading to a sleepover soon.

Your daily opossum break:

I have taken the Tylenol that was in the medicine cabinet and which they think probably is the reason you like trains forgive me but that’s bullshit you got autism from your dad

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It should be needless to say, but it is perhaps at this moment worth saying, that transgender individuals have the same right as anyone else to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

This fucking sucks. Our Chinese colleagues are valued colleagues. I am so tired of the bipartisan yellow threat shit. www.cnn.com/2025/09/11/s...

The great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh's poetic antidote to anger www.themarginalian.org/2022/02/01/f...

There does exist techno-babble-sounding jargon in the world. But then there's technical jargon as captured from a research conversation today: "I'm tracing long enough to capture many bananas." Plain, short, descriptive... and yet, it takes some experience to have any clue what's being said.

(long, reluctant sigh) sub-terfuge

The movers will come tomorrow to take my stuff to my office in the new building. I will still spend some time in this office (I am CAM director through end of June 2028). But the books are moving.

Discworld QOTD, from Night Watch “Once you get troops on the streets, it’s only a matter of time before it goes bad. Some kid throws a stone, next minute there’s houses on fire and people getting killed.”

Each Friday, I summarize what happened this week in science 🧪& higher ed. This was Week 29: - new executive order makes a mockery of peer review - UCLA facing demand for $1 Billion, patents are latest attack on Harvard - mRNA, climate assessments & so much more at buttondown.com/liminalcreat...

Me in 2023: Just chill. All the AI doom scenarios involve giving models direct access to and control over real world systems, and no one would be that dumb In 2025: oh fuck

Step 3: Profit!

I'm teaching a part of a summer program afternoons this week, and the project involves doing various things with anagrams. From a dictionary of popular words, there are six anagram groups of size 5, represented by "eat", "meat", "triangle", "tales", "tacos", and "stop".

Despite my unease, I'm still just a cow in some trees

Today is a good day to remember: "taco cat" spelled backwards is still "taco cat."

Dear #mathsky, if you repost this, it will let people see the article for free. Thanks! www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Monk seals on a beach.

I am trying to imagine how I would have reacted 20 years ago, say, to the sentence "In response to the foreign policies of President Donald Trump, the Danish government is switching to Linux.". Just... Every word would have been unexpected.

Because I am enjoying watching Murderbot, I decided to reread the Murderbot novels. And I really want to know will voice ART in season 2.

Dear everyone I owe a response to something: I am catching up with myself, and expect to get all responses out soon. Say in about two weeks...

One hundred years ago, Dr. Elbert Frank Cox earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at Cornell University. He was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbert_...

people more pro-AI than me? gullible nerds. people more anti-AI than me? fear-addled clowns. and me? perfect, as per usual

My research group at Cornell finally has a dedicated website ☺️ Still very minimal, but we will populate it soon with the cool projects we are getting off the ground! Stay tuned! sites.google.com/cornell.edu/...

We need an infinite number of Alt^n FDA accounts, each posting at some fixed fraction of the rate of the Alt^(n-1) account, and I will have my new geometric series example for the year.

Ended father's day with Scrabble, where I managed to play "qi" on the corner triple word score (building "ti" the other way). Hey, I take my victories where I can.

how the fuck is it possible to be this bad at drinking coffee

Happy father's day!

If anyone happens to know optimal rates (in m) of convergence for approximating a compact convex set in the plane by the convex hull of boundary points, I would love a pointer.

Today was the end of the Householder Symposium on Numerical Linear Algebra, which this year was held at Cornell. Anil Damle, Alex Townsend, and I were the local organizers. householder-symposium.github.io

Grateful to Householder committee for the opportunity to explain the ResQPASS algorithm at Householder symposium XXII at Cornell University --- Ithaca, NY USA. The paper, co-auther with Bas Symoens ( arxiv.org/abs/2302.13616 ), has been accepted for publication in SISC.

I'm thinking at the end of this week about advice I got in graduate school that you should "own your tools." There's value in building something to know how it works, writing something to understand it, doing something to know how to do it. It's how we pay for our skills.

Quick. Somebody tell Trump that the best way to own Elon is to restore all research grants and double NSF funding.

Somehow this comparison puts Drake in an even more unflattering light.

A meeting was canceled, and something I don't want to do beckons. Time for a brief, cathartic rant!

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH

right about now the funk soul brother check it out now the funk soul brother right about now the funk soul brother check it out now the funk soul brother right about now the funk soul brother check it out now the funk soul brother right about now the funk soul brother check it out now the funk sou

To me the most insane part of the proposed white house budget cuts to science is that they hardly save any money! They do not reduce the deficit in any meaningful way! We spend a small amount of money on science,which has yielded incredible returns.

Andrew is on point as ever: "trying to answer a question that perhaps no one should be asking anymore."

Presidential budget is out. Here's NSF. Biggest cut, by amount, is $1 billion, or 66.8%, from MPS (Physics & Math directorate). nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

Summer in Ithaca begins with unicycles, a mechanical unicorn sculpture, and the Volvo ballet! www.14850.com/052941166-it...