Viewing profile — kkylin

Where I live we still have a locally owned video rental store, though several years ago they put in a bar and now it's more a bar with a video section than a video store where you …

Related & of interest: https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2026/07/20/human-mathemati...

Actually we weren't (& aren't) able to afford this kind of thing. Dad worked for the airline & somehow got this perk, just once.

We got front lower deck seats once when I was a kid. My sister and I had extra open floor space for playing. It was great.

Bott is often quoted as saying "Evrey mathematician has a secret weapon. Mine is Morse theory." Every time I see his name I've tried to look up a source. Finally found one: https:/…

Slightly off topic (since there's already been so many better answers than I can write), but our knowledge of the dino-slaying asteroid came much later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

I really do think the incompleteness theorems deserve the attention they get, not just because of what they say about efforts to formalize mathematics and because of the historical…

In addition to the above links on quasicrystals etc, it may help to have a bit of context on periodic tilings, which have very precise mathematical properties: https://en.wikipedia…

Of course one reads a (nice) post like this and must add one's favorite not on the list. Here's mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fouquieria_columnaris

I had an even older iPad I was happily using for similar use cases. Until one day a family member bricked it and I needed to factory reset. No big deal, I thought -- nothing import…

In my couple decades as an academic mathematician I've only ever met one. He was a strong advocate, and got me to install & try it, but I could never convert to using it fulltime.

I've had the same dream! thanks for the pointer.

Yes, 1.00 was popular with Course 6ers who wanted easy units.

Not just bears it seems: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/raccoons-are-show...

Came here to say this -- looks like the data assimilation is still done the "old fashioned" way. I wonder how long that will last?

Yup. Back in my day there was 1.00, a Civil Engineering course, a pretty standard intro to programming in plain old C. I don't know if it still exists. There was nothing of that so…

We've still got this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_aphroditois Thankfully they don't live on land.

I have been using mu4e for years, and am generally happy with it, and yet... I've never recommended it to anyone else. Unlike, say, org-mode or magit, which I'd happily evangelize.…

:-) I don't question this decision is sometimes (often) driven by the need to increase publication count. (Which, in turn, happens because people find it esaier to count papers tha…

That's exactly right. A couple more things: - Differenting a function composed of simpler pieces always "converges" (the process terminates). One just applies the chain rule. Among…

Thank you so much for all this detail. This is very interesting & quite helpful, and it's great you were able to communicate all this with your friend. For anyone else interested: …

Thanks! Did you communicate in "raw" TeX, or was it compiled / encoded for braille? Can you point me at the software you used?

Like many others, I too would very much like to hear about this. I taught our entry-level calculus course a few years ago and had two blind students in the class. The technology av…

Question for all of you more knowledgeble than I: can SMART data be tampered with? When I get, say, a refurbished Mac from Apple, I'm trusting Apple won't stoop to that. But a SSD …

MIT Scheme (and ScmUtils) are unfortunately not getting enough maintainence, but they still work with a little effort. Probably better on Linux than any other environment. If you h…