Funded PhD (3 yrs): Bayesian Optimal Experimental Design Univ. of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand 🇳🇿 | Marsden Fund Math & computation for Bayesian OED in inverse problems (optimal control, filtering). Women & others underrepresented in maths/stats in particular encouraged to apply.

Am I the only one who is annoyed that we don't have a special symbol for the product integral? The \Sigma becomes and \int when we take the limit in the (Riemann) integral approximation, but the \Pi just stays a \Pi when we make a product integral!

This is brutal. Without even mentioning all the science funding cuts youtu.be/h-yjkAXxnMA?...

I am sure he will take it well when he won't have won the Nobel Peace Prize in four hours.

Who decided that the literally most vanilla dessert flavor that everyone can agree on is a very specific South American orchid? Runner-up: Rotten tree seeds, from a very specific South American tree.

Declined an invitation to a Minisymposium at a conference I usually like to go to solely because the location is in the US.

As a mapping from C to C, z \mapsto z is holomorphic, but z \mapsto \bar z is not? How do you explain reconcile this with the assumption of an all-powerful and benign god, theists?

The last few weeks I have been using our fantastic UC makerspace (with its 3d printers, soldering iron, and tools) to print the OpenFlexure Project Manual Microscope. Kudos to @openflexure.bsky.social for an amazing open source design. Looking forward to looking at pond water and earth critters.

This might be the perfect way to phrase it

Next time I run out of symbols/letters for a paper, I will take my cue from the ridiculous stuff economists seem to be get away with. This is all from a single publication.

"When you outsource the thinking, you outsource the learning." deplet.ing/the-copilot-...

What is the correct metre for the "woof, woof, woof, woof" part of "Who let the dogs out"? This has been on my mind too much recently, so here's my attempt. You're welcome, internet. (or am I wrong?)

the sound that you're hearing is global maths research grinding to a halt

Please sign this petition if you're based in NZ www.together.org.nz/fbt_for_pay_...

New dating platform for tradies just dropped

Maybe not surprising, but today I found out that a Zoom call with participants from Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and the US is hard to schedule.

This is about half a year too late, but finally Germany's domestic intelligence agency has declared AfD "confirmed right-wing extremist". www.faz.net/aktuell/poli...

I do want to encourage everyone to follow Auschwitz Memorial in order to get regular reminders on their timeline of what fascism invariably leads to.

One of the most fun things about reading comic books in languages you are trying to learn is that you learn "comic speak", i.e. other languages equivalents of "kaboom" and the like.

I found a super cool example for an affine space (as contrasted to a vector space) in real life: A piano keyboard (or more abstractly, musical notes in the western music tradition). You cannot add two notes (points) to get a new points, because you will get a chord, which is something else entirely.

Finally time for baking over the holidays. Rye/wheat

Something cool I understood this week: The Kullback-Leibler divergence between two multivariate Gaussian distributions has a closed form solution. The term with the means somehow makes sense: Penalise a covariance-weighted squared distance between the respective means. But all these matrix terms?

What's happening with the indices here? Why are they not aligned?

I like all the songs in both Moana and Moana 2, but it has been bugging me that in "How far I'll go", she sings "Everybody on this island has a role on this island", rhyming "island" with "island". Is this just lazy writing or am I missing some hidden metaphor or something here?

Ominous. (Seen in Sydney)

A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.” Absurd we still need to go through this 🧪👩‍🔬

Trying to be more mindful of violent language that I inadvertently use (and reduce it). In math we often write "with abuse of notation". I am on the fence about whether that's still an appropriate way to phrase this (and leaning towards "no"). #mathsky, what are your thoughts? Any alternatives?

@chadtopaz.bsky.social is going to talk about "Counting on Justice: Data, Race, and the Criminal Legal System" in the 1W-MINDS online seminar on 6 March! sites.google.com/view/minds-s...

Same energy

So much for free speech. Let's make this cartoon by @mluckovich.bsky.social go viral. I'm married to @tealcartoons.bsky.social so I might be biased, but cartoons have long played a vital role in shaping political debate - both past and present. This type of censorship is deeply troubling.

I (think I) finally figured out a Venn diagram for all these pesky set systems: sigma algebra, lambda-system, algebra, monotone class, pi-system!

Music is a great example for an affine space: There is no 0 (at least not on a piano), the points are the notes, and intervals are the translations. And it indeed makes no sense to add notes to get a new note (this would be a chord instead). But you can add a note and an interval to get a new note!

Don't look back, you'll trip over Michael Caine!

I can't get over how these cats are drawn. Pure nightmare fuel

RNZ reporting on the joint NZMS/AustMS/AMS meeting in Auckland: www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

Who's going to be at the NZMS, AustMS and AMS meeting next week?

The NZ government just announced they won't be funding any humanities or social science research projects through the Marsden Fund (which is NZ's only pot of money for blue-sky research). Way to show they don't care about science or academia!

Look at this neat visualisation of the bias-variance trade-off in statistical learning I made: We look at a fixed dataset (black dots) and do 1000 independent "constant" regressions of type f(x) = b_0 using random subsamples of the data. Red dots are predictions for a fixed point (blue cross)

I really love it when students feel comfortable enough to tell me in person which things they did *not* like in my course.

Nice puzzle: Make the number 24 by using 1, 3, 4, 6 exactly once, and optional any of +, -, *, / and brackets. For example 4*6 does give 24 but is not allowed because you didn't use 1 and 3.

I wonder whether the amount of nice people in math/stats academia here on bsky has reached critical mass so that we can just decide on a Codex of Better Academical Behavior that reduces systemic inequity, ableism, environmental exploitation, discrimination, bad incentives? Comment below with ideas!

Most Germans: Mixed feelings of general misery and being glad to not live in a country that is descending into fascism just yet (I'll give us until January at least!) Olaf Scholz: Rage-quits the German Government.

Microsoft is getting scarily good at inferring my mental state and sending me subtle messages via AI-generated alt texts.

To distract ourselves, some recreational Stats! Here's a fictional dataset for "Treatment A" on kidney stones. Each square is a patient, 1/3 of them have small kidney stones, 2/3 have large kidney stones. We can see that Treatment A has a success rate of 90% on small stones, and 70% on large stones.

I keep using the term "canonical" in conversations with people who don't have a tertiary education in math, which rarely works, and I'm struggling to find a good replacement that has the same meaning. Any ideas? Also, do you know some other fields' examples for words like that?

I have been thinking about this neat problem: Let's say you want to score how well someone is at making predictions. This could both be "true predictions" (weather, election results), or you're just quizzing them ("Which bird is on this picture?", "Capital of Australia?").

What would you call coding hacks like this: 1 + 0*x (in Python or R, to set up a vector of 1s with the same lengths as x). My student was mind-blown you could do that so I guess you have to see it once to think of it. Do you have more examples like this?

In a few weeks I'll be giving a short talk about "how to do research in math" to research-curious undergrads. Any tips? I have some ideas but I am sure there is excellent material out there.

I have overheard people talking about me today, saying my stats skills were only average. I am pretty sure I am at the top of the bell curve, though!