Prof weakmath (@weakmath@algebra.chat) (@weakmath) header
Prof weakmath (@weakmath@algebra.chat) (@weakmath) profile picture

Mathematician, computer scientist and humanist looking for truth. For this journey, benevolent and scientifically interested people are always welcome.

Hildesheim/Göttingen/Berlin
Joined May 2018
Photo by Prof weakmath (@weakmath@algebra.chat) (@weakmath)Photo by Prof weakmath (@weakmath@algebra.chat) (@weakmath)Photo by Prof weakmath (@weakmath@algebra.chat) (@weakmath)Photo by Prof weakmath (@weakmath@algebra.chat) (@weakmath)Photo by Prof weakmath (@weakmath@algebra.chat) (@weakmath)Photo by Prof weakmath (@weakmath@algebra.chat) (@weakmath)Photo by Prof weakmath (@weakmath@algebra.chat) (@weakmath)Photo by Prof weakmath (@weakmath@algebra.chat) (@weakmath)Photo by Prof weakmath (@weakmath@algebra.chat) (@weakmath)Photo by Prof weakmath (@weakmath@algebra.chat) (@weakmath)
Terence Tao BDay Jul 17: "Professional mathematics is not a sport. The objective in mathematics is not to obtain the highest ranking, the highest score, or the highest number of prizes and awards; instead, it is to increase understanding of mathematics." en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Terenc…
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Es ist ein trauriger Tag: vor allem für Rechtsstaatlichkeit, Datenschutz und nicht zuletzt die EU selbst.
Ein Parlament, dessen klares Nein per Verfahrenstrick in ein Ja verwandelt wird, ist kein Parlament mehr. Verfassungswidrige Massenüberwachung, durchgeboxt gegen den erklärten Willen der Abgeordneten. Wer so regiert, hat mit der Demokratie abgeschlossen.heise.de/news/Verfahrenstric…
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It's shocking, EU tries a third time to introduce chat control. It did not get a better idea, after being rejected twice. It is still something that fits to surveillance states, not for democratic states. fightchatcontrol.eu/de/#dele… The cherry on top? Apparently requesting a third vote on something rejected already twice is incompatible with the EU parliament governing procedures and planned nevertheless. Voting until the outcome fits? teapaw.org/MartinSonneborn/status…
Ich habe heute versucht, die Chatkontrolle zu stoppen. Am Wochenende mussten Sibylle Berg und ich Parlamentspräsidentin Metsola schriftlich mitteilen, dass das Durchprügeln der Chatkontrolle im Eilverfahren leider gegen die Geschäftsordnung des EU-Parlaments verstößt. Während Metsola der interessierten Presse daraufhin (fälschlicherweise) mitteilte, dass das schon alles seine Richtigkeit habe, warten wir immer noch auf ihre Antwort. Deshalb wollte ich es ihr heute bei der Eröffnungssitzung in Straßburg noch einmal erklären. Und musste erstaunt feststellen, dass die Präsidentin doch Regeln kennt: Exakt nach 60 Sekunden hat sie mir das Mikrophon abgestellt. (regelkonform, wird aber selten gemacht) Dabei hätte ich noch einiges zu sagen gehabt: "Frau Präsidentin, Sie wachen nach Artikel 22 über dieses Regelwerk (mit der ausgedruckten Geschäftsordnung wedelnd) - erklären Sie den Eilantrag für unzulässig. Wir sind hier schließlich nicht auf Malta! Die aktuelle Fassung der Geschäftsordnung überreiche ich Ihnen gerne persönlich. In der MEP-Bar." Wie es nun weitergeht? Morgen wird über das Eilverfahren abgestimmt, obwohl diese Abstimmung gar nicht stattfinden dürfte. Wenn der Antrag erfolgreich ist, kommt die Chatkontrolle Donnerstagmittag zur Abstimmung ins Plenum. Um sie noch zu stoppen, müssten 361 Abgeordnete - eine qualifizierte Mehrheit - DAGEGEN stimmen. Die schlechte Nachricht: Donnerstag ist der letzte Tag vor der Sommerpause und viele MEPs dürften bereits auf dem Weg in den Urlaub sein. Ein Schelm, wer Böses denkt bei dieser Terminierung... Smiley! Wenn die Chatkontrolle durchgeht, dürfen die Plattformen (also die US-Tech-Bros) wieder & weiterhin fröhlich & ganz legal Ihre Nachrichten scannen. Schreiben Sie also gefälligst etwas unterhaltsamer in den kommenden Wochen... ZwinkerSmiley!
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Prof weakmath (@[email protected]) retweeted
This may be a controversial take, but I think it needs to be said: the gap between computer vision research in academia and industry is widening with every conference. A huge fraction of @CVPR papers—especially those that boil down to "we tweaked/fine-tuned/RL'ed large-scale model X to improve on task Y"—will become obsolete with the next model release. That's not where academia creates lasting value. PIs should adapt much faster to this changing reality. Academia should focus on fundamentally new ideas, new problem formulations, explaining emergent phenomenology, or uncovering blind spots that industry can later solve with scale, compute, and data.
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The first time you hear about the JL lemma, it will seem too good to be true. And it is, kind of, I'll explain. The idea is: if you have points in large d-dimensional space, a RANDOM projection to much smaller k-dim subspace will be "nearly optimal" "in the general case." Or, more specifically: with high probability, the pairwise distances between points are preserved, given a couple other requirements around d and k. So why don't we just use random projections instead of carefully-constructed ones all the time? This is the most common misunderstanding of the JL lemma, and the one thing to really understand about it: in many (most?) datasets that are meaningful to humans, you actually CAN do better with something like maybe PCA. If your dataset is pathological, e.g., the points all lie on a plane even though it's technically in 3 dimensions, then clearly some planes you project onto will be better than others. The JL lemma does not apply to 2 and 3 dimensions, but you can imagine this would be true in large numbers of dimensions too. (See screenshot 1, i hope you like it because i made it myself lol.) If you know just those facts, you will be pretty well-prepared to answer most questions about its use. Most of the papers Delip mentions do presuppose that you know this. At least when I was a student, I found this to be non-obvious.
The Google turboquant paper is making ML folks in this decade discover JL lemma and interact with math folks (which is cool). It appears more cool and mysterious if you do not read ML papers from the 90s and early 2000s :)
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Prof weakmath (@[email protected]) retweeted
TGDK announces a Special Issue on "Neuro-Symbolic Modeling for Human-Centric AI" with submissions due on June 30, 2026. We welcome research, survey and resource articles at the intersection of graph-structured data / knowledge and human-centric AI. See: url-shortener.me/A3Q5
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When KAN was released, I said it was one of the truly transformative technologies Predictably, the “sceptics” arrived. Mostly math-devoid Kagglers, plus a few loud voices confusing leaderboard tricks with scientific progress. Fast-forward less than two years KAN has now surpassed the only genuinely transformative time-series models of the last two decades N-BEATS and NHIT. Let that sink in. And yes — before someone asks — KAN has also smashed transformers in this domain. Not by vibes. By results. By structure. By empirical evidence. Paper for those who actually read: [arxiv.org/pdf/2601.18837](arxiv.org/pdf/2601.18837) Moral of the story: A Kaggle badge is not a certificate of mathematical understanding. It is not proof of scientific judgment. And it certainly isn’t a crystal ball for identifying foundational ideas. Real progress doesn’t come from leaderboard folklore. It comes from theory, structure, and results that survive contact with reality History keeps repeating this lesson. Some people still haven’t learned it.
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I am an AC for ICLR 2026. One of the papers in my batch was just withdrawn. The authors wrote a brief response, explaining why the reviewers failed at their job. I agree with most of their comments. The authors gave up. They are fed up. Just like many of us. I understand. We pretend the emperor has clothes, but he is naked. Here is the final part of their withdrawal notice. I took the liberty to make it public, to highlight that what we are doing with AI conference reviews these last few years is, basically, madness. --- Comment: We thank the reviewers for their time. However, upon reading the reviews for our paper, it became immediately apparent that the four "reject" ratings are not based on good-faith academic disagreement, but on a critical failure to read the submitted paper. The reviews are rife with demonstrably false claims that are directly contradicted by the text. The core justifications for rejection rely on asserting that key components are "missing" when they are explicitly detailed in the manuscript. Some specific examples are (and many are even fake claims). Claim: Harder tasks like GSM8K are missing. Fact: GSM8K results are in many tables, like Table 2 (Section 4.2) and Appendix G. Claim: The method does not use per-layer ranks. Fact: This is the entire point of our method. The reviewer clearly mistook our method for the baselines. (Section 2, Table 1). Claim: The GP kernel is not specified. Fact: It is specified in Appendix E (Table 6). Claim: There is no ablation of the method's three stages. Fact: Section 4.4 ("Ablation Study") and Appendix J are dedicated to this. Reviewers have a fundamental responsibility to read and evaluate the work they are assigned. The nature of these errors is so fundamental, so systemic in overlooking explicit content, that it goes far beyond what "limited time" or "oversight" can explain. This work has gone through several rounds of revision over the last year. In earlier submissions, the paper usually received borderline or weak-accept scores. Numerous signs strongly suggest that some reviewers are relying entirely on AI tools to automatically generate peer reviews, rather than fulfilling their fundamental responsibility of personally reading and evaluating manuscripts. We strongly protest this. This is a gross disrespect to the authors. It is a flagrant desecration of the reviewer's sacred duty. It fundamentally undermines the integrity of the entire peer-review process. Given that the reviews are not based on the actual content of our paper, we have decided to withdraw the submission. We leave this comment so that future readers of the OpenReview page are aware that the items described as "missing" are already present in the submitted manuscript. These negative reviews for this submission are factually unsound and do not reflect the content of the paper. We cannot and will not accept an assessment that is not based on the work we actually submitted.
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This sort of thing is interesting and nice, but calling it “new theorems” is slightly misleading when we’re talking about improved bounds discovered through a big search.
AlphaEvolve Just Helped Prove New Theorems in Complexity Theory Google DeepMind's AlphaEvolve just made real breakthroughs in theoretical computer science. Instead of generating full proofs, it discovered new combinatorial structures that plug into existing proof frameworks, leading to verified, publishable theorems in complexity theory. The team improved the inapproximability bound for MAX-4-CUT and found massive Ramanujan graphs never seen before, all with provable correctness.
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I think, it is shocking that this is even supposed to be acceptable. Further information: patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/c…
The EU's Chat Control vote is scheduled for October 14, 2025. The EU plans to scan all information sent via messaging apps. Only three EU member states—Austria, Netherlands, and Poland—have announced opposition.
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Academia spent so long forcing its researchers to act more like engineers (emphasis on "societal relevance", "translational research", "pathways to impact", etc.) that engineers were forced to act like researchers to fill the gap. There's a cautionary tale here.
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A gentle reminder that TMLR is a great journal that allows you to submit your papers when they are ready rather than rushing to meet conference deadlines. The review process is fast, there are no artificial acceptance rates, and you have more space to present your ideas in the main body. And by the way, if you have experience reviewing for ML conferences and want to become a TMLR reviewer, please get in touch and share your email address. TMLR doesn't assign more than 1 submission at a time, and you can limit how many papers per year you get to review.
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I can't today
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hyperbolic ham sandwich manifold
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Oppenheimer on higher education
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#DontLookUp is a must-watch.
The movie #DontLookUp predicted a dumb tech billionaire having massive influence in gov. Don't Look Up was a documentary.
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Love this quote from Sir Michael Atiyah: "Algebra is the offer made by the devil to a mathematician. The devil says, 'I will give you this powerful machine...all you need to do is give up your soul: give up geometry...' The danger to our soul is there... when you pass into algebraic calculation,..., you stop thinking geometrically, you stop thinking about meaning.
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Today I learned that some supposedly top research programs believe that the way to establish strong research groups is to alienate and exclude talented outsiders who want to get involved, because they might threaten weaker insiders, especially in regard to attracting students.
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