Amazing thread here on a remarkable woman I'd never heard of until now. Her parents were sharecroppers, and she wound up with a PhD and an illustrious career. This is the land of opportunity for those who'll reach for it!
@minouette https://spore.social/@minouette/115445912825689899
Happy birthday to #mathematician & geodesist Gladys West (née Brown 1930)! Shown with 3 satellites important to her career + tracks: Seasat, GEOS-3 & a GPS satellite. Her work, using math to precisely model the shape of Earth, laid the groundwork for GPS! Born to sharecropper parents in Virginia, she graduated with a Math BSc in ‘52 then MSc at VSU in ‘55. She started her career at 🧵
#spacetober_challenge Earth
#linocut #printmaking #womenInSTEM #BlackInSTEM #histsci #EarthSci #Math #mastoArt
once you understand that we never outgrew wanting to watch gladiatorial battles and throw tomatoes at people in the stocks and eat junk food at public hangings the internet makes a lot more sense
I found https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/400 today and really liked it! The examples of #async cancel safety are probably the most clear examples I've seen so far 😄
Thanks @rain for putting this together! #rust #correctness
Little known Star Wars fact:
Luke actually had very little in savings. Thus, after his duel with Darth Vader, he was forced to purchase his prosthesis from a second-hand store.
I'll show myself out.
Dialing It In: A 3D-Printed Knob with Touchscreen Flair
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/05/dialing-it-in-a-3d-printed-knob-with-touchscreen-flair/
Thomas Bloom and I are launching a crowdsourced project to link up Thomas's erdosproblems.com site with the #OEIS, by systematically calculating the various integer sequences associated with the Erdos problems and crosschecking them against the OEIS database: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/08/31/a-crowdsourced-project-to-link-up-erdosproblems-com-to-the-oeis/ https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems
A 2kg glass prism has been successfully shipped from New York to the Melbourne office of Systems Approach, proving the existence of unidirectional paths in the global package shipping network.
A #rustlang feature I often want to reach for: an #[unimplemented] attribute I can put on functions that lets me set up the function signature but results in an error if called from a function that is also not marked similarly. This would be really useful for sketching out the design of a future API without needing to commit to it today, or run the risk of a dependent crate accidentally relying on its existence if its body is unimplemented!().
Recently, the erdosproblems.com site run by Thomas Bloom has enabled a discussion forum for each of the problems on the site.
As a result of some discussions I had with Stijn Cambie and Vjeko Kovac on this forum, we were able to come up with a short elementary solution to a previously open problem on the site: https://www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/379 . In fact the proof is sufficiently short and elementary that it was straightforward to formalize in Lean! https://github.com/teorth/analysis/blob/main/analysis/Analysis/Misc/erdos_379.lean
The more I learn #Rust the more I realize how much sense it makes. The borrow checker requires liveness tracking of variables which leads to lexical scoping. It's so elegant.
Farewell to the great Tom Lehrer - mathematician by day, and by night a songwriter with a magnificently dark sense of humour.
Rust For Foundational Software:
Accurately computing generalized hypergeometric functions is hard. How many terms do we need? Guess we need a general expression for the size of the terms in the series. Oh, wait, I've got one right here!
#math #RealAnalysis #NumericalComputing
https://www.skewray.com/articles/estimating-the-terms-of-generalized-hypergeometric-series
Hackaday: Let's publish an article about the safe and useful process of food irradiation
The news cycle: Hold my beer
KWin gets Liquid Glass effects “Only Apple” can make
Apple, back in June of this year:
This is our broadest software design update ever. Meticulously crafted by rethinking the fundamental elements that make up our software, the new design features an entirely new material called Liquid Glass. It combines the optical qualities of glass with a fluidity only Apple can achieve, as it t
https://www.osnews.com/story/143046/kwin-gets-liquid-glass-effects-only-apple-can-make/
I just made a heatmap to visualize the number of iterations required for the quintic polynomial root solving algorithm to converge to the roots (not Newton, but something in that spirit).
It is fascinating!
The current administration in the US has, through various funding agencies such as the NSF and NIH, has recently suspended virtually all federal grants to my home university, UCLA (including my own personal grant, although that is far from the most serious impact of this decision), on the grounds that UCLA was “failing to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias”. One can certainly debate whether these grounds were justified, or whether they merit the extremely draconian damage to the very research environment that this decision is claiming to protect, but if nothing else this unprecedented decision does not appear to have followed the usual standards of due process for actions of this nature; for instance, there appears to have been no good faith effort by the administration to receive a response from UCLA to its allegations before implementing its decision.
The suspension of my personal grant has a non-trivial impact on myself (in particular, my summer salary, which I had already deferred in order to allow the previously released NSF funds to support several of my graduate students over this period, is now in limbo), and now gives me almost no resources to support my graduate students going forward; but this is only a fraction of a percent of the entire amount being suspended. A far greater concern is the impact on the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) https://www.ipam.ucla.edu/, which despite receiving preliminary approval earlier this year for a new five-year round of funding (albeit at significantly reduced levels) from the NSF, now only has enough emergency funding for a few months of further operation at best if the suspension is not lifted. (1/4)