mathgenius

He visited Australia several times in the 90's and I remember seeing him talk about wallpaper groups back then. One time he was explaining orbifolds [1] by folding up a piece of paper, and he somehow made a cone shape, and it somehow ended up on his head, and then he proceeded to march around like a crazy guy. It was hilarious.

In 2008 I was living in New York city and Conway gave a series of lectures at Princeton on quantum physics and the "free will" theorem [2]. I was able to take the train down to Princeton to see a couple of them, and it was awesome. He was a bit shaky at first because he had just had a health scare, but he soon got into the swing of things.

I would highly recommend the biography: "Genius At Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway" by Siobhan Rob. It is a lot of fun!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbifold_notation [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604079

Electronic download, free until the end of July.

Startup idea: backup your google everything.

I believe that not being able to see the "upvotes" on each comment is a good thing, and really cools down a lot of the intense vibes. People place way to much emphasis on this number, and I'm glad we don't have them here. Also good: submissions cannot be downvoted. Flagging appears to be a kind of pseudo-downvoting in that it causes submissions to fall in rank, but does not effect the upvote score. Compare with other sites like reddit or the stackoverflows, it really sucks submitting stuff there and then having it be downvoted to oblivion. Once you attach a number to something, it heavily biases your opinion of that thing, be it number of followers, or dollars, or upvotes, or whatever. There's probably some psychology experiment I should be citing here...

I would say that learning mathematics is virtually impossible without a teacher. Like, would you try learning Karate without a teacher? How about if you get with a bunch of friends and you all try to learn it together? No way.

Even the professionals try to find someone to learn a new concept from. There's something about mathematical writing that is too fragile/brittle for wetware.

One other strategy: I've noticed the really smart (arrogant?) people just don't bother reading new mathematics, they re-invent it themselves. It's actually worth trying if you can stomach it.

Remote work, zoom, etc.

Your friend should start with a project in mind. Even if they fail, it will guide everything else. First thing they need to find out is do they have any talent, or equivalent amount of burning desire, etc. Programming is hard, and not for most people (imo.) Supplementary income is one of the worst reasons to do this, but understandable.

Conversely, the value you place on some endeavor may be completely unrecognized by everyone else, ie. the market. That does not mean the endeavor is worthless.

Particle physics != foundations of physics.

Pretty much every buzzword used halves my expectation that this code will actually work... But I hope it does because this actually looks useful.

Let's not forget Ludwig Boltzmann, who derived the thermodynamic properties of gases assuming the existence of atoms:

' In 1904 at a physics conference in St. Louis most physicists seemed to reject atoms and he was not even invited to the physics section. Rather, he was stuck in a section called "applied mathematics" '

Things did not end well for Boltzmann [1].

And my favourite, John Bell, who was the first to understand the consequences of entanglement, in 1964. These ideas were met with derision by the mainstream for decades (citation needed.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Boltzmann

I bought this book after reading about Simon Norton's passing early this year. It's nice to read about this quirky genius, but I did find the author's writing too over-done.

Luckily for us, one of his most important lectures was recorded and uploaded to youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO0iyzYUTgo

Make sure you watch all of it, there's some bombshells in there.

> the content is interesting but the ROI is low ...

Even mathematicians themselves have had this view, for a long time. The attitude appears to be "hey I'm doing my good calculations here, why should I be messing around with arrows?" Theoretical physicists are now getting involved in this debate aswell. So it's a much bigger complaint than "how is this going to give me better programs?"

I've thought so much about this, I don't really know where to start. The functional programming stuff is nice, but it is only one manifestation of CT ideas. Probably, if you are any good at programming you are already "doing" CT. Anytime you have a class invariant, you are "doing" category theory. The methods are preserving some kind of structure (the class invariant.) And that is the key idea behind OOP. That is what it means to have an object and not just a bucket of data. FP does this too but in a strict way; nothing is mutable.

The revelation of CT is how deep (or wide?) these ideas are, but maybe the only thing you get from this is the satori.

Here's a really great introduction to CT for the non-mathematically inclined:

Lawvere and Schanuel. "Conceptual mathematics: a first introduction to categories." Cambridge University Press, 2009.

The authors are two of the "founders" of the subject, so don't be fooled by the elementary appearance of this book.

I'm interested, but this is all I have to say about it: get a bunch of physicists in a room and I'm sure they could come up with 100 other possible theories for this other than "aliens did it". I'm not saying these theories will be particularly convincing, some of them may involve time-travel (physicists are a whacky bunch) but these UFO people seem to be locked into a way of thinking of these things as solid objects zooming around, "an f-18 couldn't do that" etc. etc. Meh.

In the 1850's it was widely believed that the invention of the telegraph would bring about world peace.

The problem is language itself. We trust it way too much to convey meaning, and truth. But it's just a delusion, or a mirage, in much the same way that the search for artificial intelligence is. In fact, I would say that language itself is the first AI invented.

> things a brain can think about that a Turing machine cannot

You say this as though we understand what "thinking" is. We do not.

Chaitin's "meta math" is also a good read. Less arduous than G.E.B.

Very interesting. I'm not much of a DB person, but it sounds similar to the idea of "stateless". In other domains this is very important, eg. pure functional programming. It's just good programming practice in general to keep state to a minimum.

I'm sure that is what they tell themselves at youtube HQ. But I'm not convinced. Why should one A.I. fit everyone? It just seems like laziness, ie. corporate inertia, to me. If they could open up an API for third party recommenders this would really be interesting.

"What are the elements of higher-level cognition? Causality is one element of it, and there’s also reasoning and planning, imagination, and credit assignment ..."

I don't think we have any clue about the answer to this question. Reasoning and planning, etc., it's just epiphenomena of consciousness.

"the value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and removal, and towards recommendation algorithms directing one’s attention"

I really wish I could hack on the youtube recommendation algorithm. It seems to be tuned for zombie viewing pleasure, and totally not for finding surprising new content. Even just having several "personas" would be a big help.

Traders use stoploss orders when they enter a position. After a few days or weeks of this, there’s a huge pile of these stoploss orders, on both sides. A bit of movement is all it takes to trigger an avalanche.

> a mathematical dual of the physical world.

This sounds right to me. More examples: syntax versus semantics, theory versus model, algebra versus geometry.

Here's something I discovered recently: "Meaning and Duality From Categorical Logic to Quantum Physics" by Yoshihiro Maruyama http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/bob.coecke/Yoshi.pdf

"Getting leaders who are inspired by these huge challenges, rather than burying their heads in the sand, would be a big step in the right direction."

There are no leaders anymore. The world is being driven by a message-passing algorithm, called "the economy" (or perhaps, the political-economy.) This algorithm is one of the best AI algorithms we have, known as "belief propagation". And indeed, we have constructed wonders at its behest. But, as is typical of AI algorithms, this one does not generalize beyond a certain domain. Unless we demote this algorithm, we are very likely going to get into some serious trouble.

This presentation of calculus is bog standard. I can't quite fathom how a few little gifs can make people so excited. Is it the Will Ferrel meme? Apart from that, this is dull as dishwater.

I don't know what this guy is doing with all this pragma stuff... Once you hook up to a NordVPN server the IP doesn't change... NordVPN has thousands of servers, I assumed that is why the content providers don't block them, because they can't keep up. Except amazon, which seems to be better at blocking than the others.

Is this guy saying that these thousands of servers are not in some data center somewhere, but actually residential malware?I'm doing some tracepath'ing (not a network guy...) and I don't see what this guy is claiming. I'm calling bs.

> anyone who is logic and science based will immediately cease ...

Why be so rigid ? I am a scientist. I would be happy to listen to someone talk about their "saturn return", etc. etc. if that helps them convey meaning.

I second these recommendations. Also, some other ideas: pilates, swimming, argentine tango (it's amazing what dancing with a beautiful person in your arms can do to pain.)