A large ice sculpture of the word “Democracy” was placed on the National Mall on Wednesday morning in direct view of the U.S. Capitol as a vanishing reminder of rapidly eroding rights and an existential threat to the freedom on which America was founded. https://wapo.st/3J8Q46P

Congratulations, you're department chair.

Breaking news: MIT’s president turned down the Trump administration’s offer of priority access for federal funding, publicly releasing a letter that emphasized the elite university’s values.

Note the wording.. Ms. Machado receives the prize for: - promoting democratic rights - struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition - At a time when democracy is under threat - where democracy is in retreat - more and more authoritarian regimes are challenging norm www.nobelpeacecenter.org/en

All conspiracy theories eventually lead to antisemitism.

"I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag." - Molly Ivins #BurntheFlag

Sprachmodelle gewinnen Mathe-Olympiaden und lösen Aufgaben auf Doktorandenniveau. Doch im Arbeitsalltag der meisten Mathematiker spielen die neuen Technologien bisher keine Rolle - trotzdem verändern sie das Fach.

Der Sinn „die AntiFa“ zu verbieten ist es übrigens nicht „die AntiFa“ zu verbieten, sondern Mittel in die Hand zu bekommen gegen jede einzelne Person, die einem nicht passt, vorzugehen mit der Behauptung sie sei Teil „der AntiFa“.

Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion. Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.

There is no world in which it is normal for the president to publicly call upon his attorney general to hurry up and prosecute his political foes. It’s like the Watergate tapes but posted on social media. Let’s get a grip on what’s happening here.

In a less insane time, if it was discovered that the President of the United States said this privately to their AG, it would’ve triggered an all-encompassing, impeachable corruption scandal. Here, Trump is saying it publicly and it’s just another Saturday.

Where the separate divisions of ANTIFA landed on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944:

The first ScienceBench benchmark is live! 👉 math.science-bench.ai/benchmarks/ We tested all major AI models on 100 research-level mathematics problems. #AI #Mathematics #AIBenchmark #EpochAI #FrontierMath #OpenAI #DeepSeek

All kidding aside, suffering from both leprosy & syphilis at 79 is no joke, but I am sure whatever cure RFKjr is mixing up will get him back on the golf course in no time.

🚨 New preprint alert 🚨 With my awesome student Elena Hoster, we just posted Chow polynomials of simplicial posets with positive $h$-vector are real-rooted arxiv.org/abs/2508.15538 Read it while it is still fresh and warm 🍞! #MathResearch #MathSky #Combinatorics

Featured on @nbcnews.com! Our USA IMO team outperformed the world’s smartest AI. High school mathletes, proving human brilliance still shines. Watch their story here: youtu.be/dSSeoQcY1n4?...

I have been #VibeCoding a website in #VSCode, using different models, mostly GPT-4.1, GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4. The codebase is 99832 lines with #HTML 43%, #Python 36%, #JavaScript 21% It is great and you get good results very fast. But the quality of the code is a disaster. Some impressions:

Are you a math researcher? Challenge the newest AI models with your hardest PhD-level exercises and learn how to use AI in your math research: math.science-bench.ai #Mathematics #MathResearch #MathEducation #LLM #AI #Science

How will research mathematics change with the use of #LLMs like #GPT-5? Based on many discussions, @tomkalei.bsky.social and I have written up some unfinished thoughts about the process: Mathematics in the Context Window www.thomas-kahle.de/blog/2025/ma... #Mathematics #MathResearch #AI #LLM #LRM

Liebe @zeit.de! Euer Artikel "Oh, Geheimnis" vom 25.7. beginnt mit "Beinahe jeder Wissenschaftler erlebt irgendwann einmal den Augenblick des Triumphes über seine Widersacher und Konkurrenten..." Das ist glücklicherweise großer Quatsch. Normalerweise haben Wissenschaftler:innen keine Widersacher.

One reason a German train accident is international news and German car accidents are not is that roughly 1000x more people die in car accidents each year in Germany. It’s so common that it’s not newsworthy. https://apnews.com/article/germany-train-derailment-38e8960c549b4d1c43e0b7172b18b19a

Worth a watch: Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

I asked #ChatGPT a math question again and again, receiving various wrong answers. I then gave it a hint that let it solve it correctly. Since then, it always gives the correct answer. Did my solution enter the training data, or does it know my complete history and finds the correct solution? #AI

Hans Litten, der aufrechte Antifaschist, Hitlergegner und Kämpfer für die Rechte der Schwachen wäre heute 122 Jahre alt geworden. Er ist uns Vorbild und Ansporn. www.hans-litten.de/sein-leben/

Paper Alert: My first joint paper with Christian Krattenthaler: Positive m-divisible non-crossing partitions and their Kreweras maps The project took forever. Started in 2012. Has 169 pages. I love the results, but the proofs are the most technical treatment I ever did.

Best image of the day:

I just love vibe coding! It is such a game changer. Comment 1 (screenshot): It is so funny when I explain sth and copilot implements parts and forgets the rest. I then remind it to complete my request, and it admits to have forgotten to finish the work. Copilot really behaves human-like.

Our official math department insta account. Part 1: There are as many integers as even numbers.

This framing is all wrong Our international students are not a “crucial funding source” They are our STUDENTS They are the reason we EXIST We teach STUDENTS

Millionenförderung für unsere Exzellenzcluster! 🎉 Wir gratulieren den Forschenden der Cluster CASA und @solvationsci.bsky.social zu ihrem verdienten Erfolg.

Powerful.

Academic conference. You invented academic conference.

Die Mütter und Väter des Grundgesetzes haben uns Instrument des Parteiverbots an die Hand gegeben, weil sie wussten, dass es möglich ist, dass Parteien sich demokratischer Mittel bedienen, um an die Macht zu kommen -um sie dann zu zerstören. Die AfD ist genau eine solche Partei.

Good Night World

Originaltext: news.rub.de/wissenschaft... Daraus generierter KI-Schrott: das-wissen.de/kis-versagen...

Lol fuck you very much

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

Right now, we have an authoritarian president. He called CNN "illegal." He is trying to encroach on the spending powers of Congress. He is going after the courts. Trump does not respect our Constitution. He just wants more and more power for himself.

1. For the past thirty years I've had the best job in the world. 
I've had the opportunity to follow my curiosity; explore the workings of nature and society; mentor students and junior colleagues in the same process; and teach generations of students about it all.

Ask yourself: Why would anyone who wasn’t an asset of the Russian government do this? Why would any decent human being do this?

French researcher, going to a conference in Houston, was forbidden entry to US; his work and personal electronics were both confiscated. Why? Because a “random search” of his cell phone revealed a negative personal opinion on Trump and the Trump administration. www.lemonde.fr/internationa...

Well that’s a headline I did not except to see. Ever.

Ja.

It is genuinely your moral duty, if you’re in the sciences, to violate the terms of your contact and take as much of the research home with you as you can. Today, tomorrow, every day your lab’s still open.