Quant Researcher. Previously Software Engineer @Google, Quant Trader @citsecurities, and PhD in Theoretical Computer Science @UofIllinois
Chicago, IL
Joined September 2017
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The shamelessness of a lot of these profs is truly mind blowing.
$115 for a PhD application btw. Sometimes the only reason to apply to a school is one professor.
Gee, I wonder why students personalize these emails. Could it be that the app costs 115 fucking dollars? That they have no idea if the one person they want to work with in the school is even taking students? That any generic email gets ignored?
Nope. Must be scheming students trying to con you.
The “HRT intern class is the new PayPal mafia” thing is so forced. It was a 3 week winter program in 2015. The PayPal mafia built a company together for years.
If you want an actual mafia look at Tsinghua's Yao Class: Kimi, OpenAI, DeepSeek and xAI
Elfarouk Harb 🌱 retweeted
Son has developed a math proof:
There are two ways to make an even number. (even + even, odd + odd). There has one way to make an odd number (odd + even). Therefore, there are fewer odd numbers than even numbers.
Bullshit. It's happened to me plenty of times in quant and tech interviews, and whenever I've said upfront that I'd seen the problem before, the interviewer just asked me to quickly sketch the solution to confirm I actually understood it. If I were interviewing someone who did that and couldn't even explain the core idea, I'd reject them on the spot.
If I had to guess underlying tech, 3D Gaussian Splatting + High precision Lidar/Slam scanners —> feed it into a modeling agent/harness like VIGA/ChatGPT to reproduce references from the render —> Final touches by human modelers. Main issue is anyone who can afford the scanners can probably afford to do the rest on their own…
Moving Atoms (YC S26): Scan to Sim is here.
Send us a LiDAR or SLAM scan of your factory floor, warehouse or yard, from any scanner. Upload multi-gigabyte scans straight from your browser (up to 200 GB per file). Within 48 hours you get back a simulation-ready digital twin of your real site. Every object is separated and editable, and accurate robot embodiments are placed right on your floor: autonomous forklifts, pallet AMRs, tuggers, tote robots and palletizing arms.
Test the workflow before you build it. Try layouts, fleet sizes and routes, then watch the whole operation run sped up, before a single robot arrives on site.
Elfarouk Harb 🌱 retweeted
Let me try to state this differently - AI now performs the transitive closure of what we know (or very close to knowing). So, in many cases, it would feel like we were just a blip away from doing it ourselves. I have experienced this feeling several times by now.
> "Neither Fable 5.1 nor Opus 5.5 could refute the conjectures without the hint of our approach …. Now this tells me that our 2023 write-up was useful"
Or it tells you that the models you used are weaker in Math. Here is ChatGPT Astra refuting all 3 conjectures in ~45 minutes given only Coppersmiths’ 1982 paper, and van den Brand, Nanongkai, and Saranurak's 2019 paper: chatgpt.com/share/6acee44d-d…
The underlying impulse is very human, I understand why having the right idea on the shelf since 2023 and abandoning it is frustrating. But hinting that the models couldn't have done it without our "human insight" is just pure copium at this point and does no service for anyone.
> "Neither Fable 5.1 nor Opus 5.5 could refute the conjectures without the hint of our approach …. Now this tells me that our 2023 write-up was useful"
Or it tells you that the models you used are weaker in Math. Here is ChatGPT Astra refuting all 3 conjectures in ~45 minutes given only Coppersmiths’ 1982 paper, and van den Brand, Nanongkai, and Saranurak's 2019 paper: chatgpt.com/share/6acee44d-d…
The underlying impulse is very human, I understand why having the right idea on the shelf since 2023 and abandoning it is frustrating. But hinting that the models couldn't have done it without our "human insight" is just pure copium at this point and does no service for anyone.
I rarely post here these days but I wanted to share my reflections: people.csail.mit.edu/virgi/t…
“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” — Jonathan Swift
The leopards ate my face syndrome needs to be studied. If you think it stops at math, wait till you find out what leopards eat…
Literally saw an econ prof from @HarvardHBS gloating about this on Twitter 3 days ago, then deleted it a few minutes later. Math got hit first because AI labs aimed at it first, not because it’s easier. Point a tiny fraction of the same money at econ and see what happens. What exactly are people schadenfreude-ing about?
Related: when I TA'd algorithms in Fall 2022, I polled the class on P vs NP, framing it with Avi Wigderson’s question of whether intuition can be “mechanized”, or whether solving a problem feels "polynomially close" in effort to verifying a solution. Exactly one student believed P=NP.
I asked again when I taught in early and late 2025. Nearly a third of the class raised their hands.
I suspect many students growing up with AI will eventually wonder why we were ever stuck on math problems that AI now solves in seconds.
Holy fuck. Just based on a cursory look, major ones seem:
Unique Games Conjecture proved
L = RL = BPL
Matrix multiplication with ω ≤ 9/4, insane jump from the current best ~2.37
Ω(n³) permanent vs. determinant lower bound
FFT and integer multiplication faster than nlogn
Almost-linear time maximum matching and edit distance approximation
We’re releasing a broad range of new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model.
We’ve been consulting with the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Advanced Study, and we have drawn on their advice and public recommendations to inform how we release these results.
github.com/openai/math
Elfarouk Harb 🌱 retweeted
The what now?!
arxiv.org/abs/2610.06783v1
