Viewing profile — johncarlosbaez

Adelson-Velsky and Evgenii Landis were not the ones who named their tree the "AVL tree". In my "crackpot index", item 20 says: 20 points for naming something after yourself. (E.g.,…

Yes - by cooling it. See the problem?

You need to go more slowly and do lots of examples. Maybe start with * Karen E. Smith, Lauri Kahanpää, Pekka Kekäläinen and William Traves, An Invitation to Algebraic Geometry, Spr…

This claimed proof is a bunch of baloney: * First, it's written in the typical style of AI slop. * Second, a mathematician I know and trust writes "I went straight to the technical…

I'm starting to make videos for the University of Edinburgh. My first one was about this paper saying that neutrino oscillations may increase the formation of gold and other heavy …

Or if you believe the simulation hypothesis, the second-largest.

Quoting https://thenieveslawfirm.com/do-police-have-to-identify-them... : You’re minding your own business when a police officer approaches you. They start asking questions, but so…

"Whatever the reason, the resistance to AC technology is making Europe a more impoverished civilization. It’s a major reason why Europe now feels shabbier and more hardscrabble tha…

It's a little late for a "wakeup call", no? More like "wake up, your house is on fire and behind your bedroom door it's a raging inferno out there". > The economics profession shou…

Fixed - thanks.

Never a good sign for a physics theory when the headline says it's "not dead".

My fifteen minutes of fame have finally arrived? :-)

Strange title, since we've known for a long time that Mars has an atmosphere unlike our own.

Why would anyone care what Rand Paul thinks?

Yes, we've really sunk to this: a rebel theoretical physicist feels the need to debate a guy who claims 1 × 1 = 2, presumably just to get some more publicity. Howard's Wikipedia pa…

It's good to do if your life isn't boring enough and you need to avoid pleasure.

I know plenty of math, but having more ignorant victims will make it easier.

I hope they stop teaching people to calculate. Then I'll start up my career in fraud and embezzlement.

After fighting through a bunch of unhelpful answers, one gets to the bottom of things: Benjamin Franklin chose a convention that makes electrons negative, and apparently nobody kno…

That explains having a 50% chance of seeing an electron somewhere, not seeing an entity of charge 1/2. It's like a weather report saying there's a 50% chance of rain doesn't mean y…