Some links generated by taking the Markov trace of random words in the braid group 🧮

The soda can is one of the few objects that gets to begin and end its useful lifetime with opposites: the vending machine and the bottle return.

Sure would be nice if the student paper didn’t misrepresent the faculty meeting discussion of the project my committee has been working on for the past year…

Nice reference on using LaTeX as a mathematician: github.com/nchopin/best...

Wonderful-if-slightly-cursed theorem: the order of the spherical braid group on n strands (that is, the fundamental group of the unordered configuration space of n points on the 2-sphere) for n=1,2,3,4,5,6,... is 1, 2, 12, ∞, ∞, ∞, ....

CRISPR’ing stem cells so the fleshy substance in this tin renewably generates toilet paper as long as I feed it once a month.

Happening tomorrow! My sessions are 11:30-12:30 and 1-2 (same activities both times). Register at www.reed.edu/academics/sp....

A unitary executive implies the existence of orthogonal, symplectic, and general linear executives.

Why — WHY?! — after 230 years living with this document, has no American entrepreneur started an insurance agency called Domestic Tranquility?

I'm leading the session "Braids and Knots in Mathematics" at Reed's Open Days science outreach event this Saturday November 15. The event is free and open to all (registration and waiver required). If you're based near Portland, I'd love to see you there! www.reed.edu/academics/sp...

Curved circular creases of annuli. A construction by Erik and Martin Demaine (all rights reserved). Several annuli intertwined. #MathSky #MathArt #Geometry #Origami More examples: erikdemaine.org/curved/)

Daina Taimina, a Cornell University mathematician uses crochet to demonstrate Hyperbolic Geometry #womensart

Free video game idea: Guitar hero but there's not a single path, you're in a labyrinth and the music — haunting, hypnotic music — changes depending on the paths you choose.

Upon further reflection, I can see why no one talks about the hairy donut theorem. 🧮

The audience for this joke consists of about thirty people worldwide, but they would all attest that it's very funny.

Ungrading is when you forget a 𝔾ₘ-action.

Can anyone recommend especially good recordings of Erik Satie's Trois Gnossiennes? I have decided to live inside of them instead of reality.

He is ball.

Junior Colleague: When did you start working at Reed? Me: Back in 2014. JC: Oh, that's when I graduated from high school! [A light breeze brushes my skin and my desiccated corpse collapses into a pile of ashes.]

What if Doctor Frankenstein was the real monster all along? 🤔

local lovecraftian horror the alexander horned sphere asking "please sir, I want some more". would you deny him?

Today I get to think about resultants, so I got that going for me, which is nice.

Excited for the new jumping spider friend at home.

x is interior to A if and only if

Inside hiring of NIH directors during a government shutdown. Nothing to see here.

When non-mathematicians say something is “integral” to something else, do you think they mean the Riemann, the Riemann-Stieltjes, or the Lebesgue integral?

Free talk idea: a lineup of math faculty take turns standing at a microphone and confidently saying outrageous but true things about concepts in introductory math classes until they're heckled off stage, when it becomes the next person's turn. Called, "Sure, but You Can't Just SAY That!"

It’s quite distressing to have a former college ultimate frisbee teammate now be a newscast anchor for NPR. That is supposed to be a disembodied voice, not someone you’ve played drinking games with.

One of my (many) mathematical lacunæ is Young tableaux. What's up with those things? Irreps? Schubert calculus? Tell me why you like them!

🌞Summer School Announcement🌞 🎓∞-Category Theory at ICERM!🎓 I am happy to announce that together with @emilyriehl.bsky.social and Jonathan Weinberger we are organizing a Graduate Training Workshop teaching ∞-category theory via proof assistants!🧠💻 More infos in the next post👉

Incredible and tragic: Eliud Kipchoge made a surprise visit to my kid's cross country team on Wednesday and we missed it 😭

You can tell I'm not a native Oregonian because it was only at his passing that I learned that Ken Kesey's brother co-founded Nancy's Yogurt. www.opb.org/article/2025...

That’s my senator!

Why are there two copies of Jeff Bezos in the Oval Office?

That’s 397 pounds lost on average for every person in the United States.

Tell your friends! Warn your enemies! @mathandcobb.bsky.social will be sharing his take on Math in the Age of Social Media on Monday at the next @code4math.org Convening! Join the conversation on our Zulip: code4math.zulipchat.com#narrow/chann...

Pumpkin pie mochi cake. Is anyone working on this?

More like Ross Doubt That amirite?

Thank you, Nancy. Please have a chat with your fellow octogenarian — hell, even septuagenarian — colleagues on the way out.

Numbers: how do they work?

Grant application submitted with 44 minutes to spare! 🥳

If you're in the complex projective line, STAY IN THE COMPLEX PROJECTIVE LINE.

And indeed, my physical and psychic ills *can* be cured via "chromotherapy" (SAD lamp).

This is a good reminder that I still need to write a popular article that embraces ambiguity in order of operations and uses it to explore trees, parthenthesizations, the associahedron, and operads. 🧮

I am disappointed to learn that \pagenumbering{gobble} makes page numbers disappear in LaTeX instead of making them Thanksgiving themed.

Oh, but I would.

Teaching my 8yo that if a regular n-gon need not be convex, then there are ϕ(n)/2 of them up to similarity, where ϕ is the Euler totient function. 😈

everything is about the tensor product except the tensor product, which is about power

Not to defend generative AI, and certainly not to defend the companies creating it, but the fact that training basically consists of matrix multiplication is one of the coolest things about it.

A House of Dynamite is a very fun watch if you enjoy remembering how stockpiles of nuclear weapons place us on a razor's edge where one misstep could lead to total annihilation and hahaha isn't it especially fun when you remember who controls the US's nuclear codes.