Congratulations to the forty mathematical scientists named Fellows of the American Mathematical Society for 2026. Recognized by their peers, AMS Fellows have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication, and utilization of mathematics.

We finally have a proof of Fermat’s last theorem that fits in a margin, achieving the dream of centuries of mathematicians. Namely, “by [TayWi95]…”

Experiencing extreme levels of “someone is wrong on the internet” today.

Oh, you have criticisms of my paper? Surely you noticed the part of the paper where we already rebutted your critique, by writing “Possible criticisms: the methodology of this paper is bad. We are aware of this.”

pretty bleak

airport bird!!!

it’s time for universities to return to their core mission (acting as the settings of novels by middle-aged professors about the midlife crises of middle-aged professors)

it’s time for universities to return to their core mission (an escalating series of pranks played by a trouble-making fraternity on the straight-edge dean who will stop at nothing to shut them down)

they have a great 4-lecture mini-course about local systems on algebraic variables. highly recommended that you attend. will cure depression, life changing

Going to Padua next week to give a 4-lecture mini-course on “Local Systems on Algebraic Varieties.” Apparently the university is quite old—if anyone knows any math- or science-related sights there that I should check out, please let me know.

Have you in your field seen a lot of LLM-assisted papers on the ArXiV claiming to solve an open problem? I hear @littmath.bsky.social report a lot of "proofs" of the Hodge conjecture, but I haven't heard anyone about other open problems. Have you heard about YM mass gap? Riemann hypothesis? P=NP?

back on the good stuff (geodesic dome tourism)

Heading to Fort Collins for the once-a-decade algebraic geometry summer research institute. Please say hi if you’re around! (And come to my talk tomorrow on “p-curvature and non-abelian cohomology”!)

I've been working on a new tool, Refine, to make scholars more productive. If you're interested in being among the very first to try the beta, please read on. Refine leverages the best current AI models to draw your attention to potential errors and clarity issues in research paper drafts. 1/

at 10,000 followers I will reveal the title of my Grothendieck biopic screenplay

planning to use this picture in a talk to explain what a foliation is, feeling extremely Canadian

Giving a slide talk next week—thinking of trying something other than Beamer. Any recommendations for software for beautiful math talks?

OpenAI has just announced that their experimental model achieved IMO gold, solving P1-5. Solutions here: github.com/aw31/openai-...

Leaving out the parts that people tend to skip, but for math papers.

Most writing is improved by simply removing the first sentence. And then the new first sentence, and so on.

it was a perfect summer day in Toronto. the sun was out; the subway station garbage bags danced upside-down in the wind

I actually count 6(!) LLM-generated nonsense papers on the Hodge conjecture posted to arXiv since June 15, of 8 total papers that mention it in the title or abstract.

In the last month there have been at least 3 (nonsense) papers on the Hodge conjecture posted to arXiv that I am 99% sure are LLM-generated, complete with hallucinated citations, etc. Very obnoxious to pollute the commons this way.

unsolved millennium prize problems are just evidence that the problems are wrongly priced. if they gradually raise the reward money, eventually the supply and demand will match and a solution will arise. its just economics

Claude: my wife and I went antique shopping this weekend Gemini: if I can’t get this code to work I will k*** myself ChatGPT: the answer to your question came to me in a dream Grok: Litt, eh? Shortened from the Ashkenazi name Litwak?

you're telling me this firmware update to my Neuralink device will make me maximally truth-seeking? sign me up!

Claude: my wife and I went antique shopping this weekend Gemini: if I can’t get this code to work I will k*** myself ChatGPT: the answer to your question came to me in a dream Grok: Litt, eh? Shortened from the Ashkenazi name Litwak?

“we have an ellipsoid at home” / the ellipsoid at home

4 days left to claim the bounty on this MO post: mathoverflow.net/questions/49...

New paper with my postdoc Simone Coccia!

Simone Coccia, Daniel Litt Density of integral points in the Betti moduli of quasi-projective varieties https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00167

I’ve started asking frontier AI models (o3 pro, Gemini 2.5) for comments on my paper drafts. So far only moderately useful (some typos caught, mostly the comments are nonsense) but I do enjoy that they ALWAYS recommend submitting to Inventiones.

my p doom? sorry that's not a valid sigma algebra

yes I’m worried about x-risk, why do you ask?

I asked a MathOverflow question. Please tell me if you know the answer! mathoverflow.net/questions/49...

9% chance of catgirl dystopia

dyson sphere betting odds

uber driver singing along with the radio has an incredible voice

after every talk I give, my wife asks me "how'd it go?" and i say "I think I made it too hard," and she says "you always say that." trying to keep this in mind as I write my talk for tomorrow

wait, you guys haven’t been paying tips on your taxes?

Incredibly bad (changes to N.S.F. funding for math):

If the last time you tried to use an LLM for math was ~4 or 5 months ago it’s worth firing up Gemini 2.5 (which you can try for free) or ChatGPT o3 and getting a sense of how rapidly things have progressed.

first math pope?

Let E be an elliptic curve over Q. Fix x in the Q-vector space H_dR(E) and a prime p at which E has good ordinary reduction. Suppose that, under the de Rham-crystalline comparison x becomes an eigenvector for crystalline Frobenius at p. Does E necessarily have CM?

the gulf of America? oh, you mean the distance between who we are as a nation and who we could be?

as an American expat in Canada I’ve never felt more Torontonian than this morning, walking in to work after a blizzard and exchanging knowing nods with everyone shoveling off their cars and sidewalks. unexpected feeling of camaraderie.

the gulf of America? oh, you mean the yawning void at the heart of our nation, the hole that can be filled only by recapturing a past glory which, perhaps, never even existed in the first place?

parent of toddler moment

Furiously changing “inclusion” to “monomorphism”!

they’re flagging grant applications containing the word “polarization.” lmao please don’t make me explain “polarizable variations of hodge structure” to the DEI police