⁕ pure math undergrad ⁕ in love with anything algebraic ⁕
292 posts
Latest Posts by bsdndprplplld - Page 3
when I (fucking finally) finish this semester I plan to do a deep dive into TQFT and frobenius algebras with this book recommended by my supervisor:
I find the concept to be very elegant. loosely speaking, take a commutative ring R and an algebra A over this ring that satisfies the axioms of the frobenius algebra. it turns out that for any such algebra there is an R-module associated to a certain 3-manifold, in which there are operations (induced by the algebra) on cobordisms between the systems of curves embedded in the boundary of the manifold. this is related to knot theory and apparently to some quantum blah blah, which I don't know much about yet
rb this with your favorite math concepts/books/videos... things u enjoy and that make you excited! (or reply but i want to hear about it and if you rb it then i hear more cool stuff from more people)
my favorite books are the grapes of math and things to make and do in the fourth dimension. i'm also reallyyyy wanting to read number freak and godel, escher, bach. concepts i love are chaos theory, non-euclidean geometry, and dimensions beyond 3rd!
*through tears* I don’t ever want to let my fear of failure trump the wonder of mathematics, I don’t ever want to be so scared of it that I forget to treasure it, I don’t ever want to let my feelings of being small deter me from even trying to dig deeper, I don’t ever want to turn my eyes away from the beauty, even though it is blinding. Never, never, never.
that's an interesting perspective
recently I've been thinking about it in an opposite way. it started during a conversation about brains, in particular how stupid and flawed they are, I realized that I enjoy math because it gives me a break from being human. there is no place for emotion and cognitive bias, only formal reasoning and proofs. it feels so safe and so distant from the day-to-day life filled with problems caused by the human nature, it feels so clean. it's a place for me to enjoy only the best qualities of my existence. it's an acceptable way to separate myself from everyone, and simultaneously stay connected
I love how different this is from what is described above, as if math offered a place for everyone to find something that they will like
Im trying to find a really long Tumblr post that talked about how sad it was that people are so happy to complain about how much they hated math and how math can be a way to connect with your fundamental humanity and...
Yeah, I've been studying a little bit of it on my own, ten years after I dropped out of college, I've been going back to seeing some basics of calculus, and I've been really feeling some of that.
There is this sense that math is this alien thing, separate from the true concerns of humanity. This external topic, strange and inhumane that only those few weirdos with a eccentric and atypical cast of mind, who are themselves separate by a few degrees from human nature, can grasp.
But it's not that, We, messy warm emotional dumb humans came up with it, we silly atavistic creatures dedicated so much time and effort to develop it and explore it, this silly, quirky, wet, ape-like species is the only living creature on this planet that concerns itself with doing math in any serious capacity. It didn't come from aliens or the gods or from dolphins, math came from humans and humans are the only ones that use them. There could be nothing more human, more fundamentally ours, more intrinsic to our nature than math.
And it's not just a tool! Is not just this thing to be celebrated because its useful in a purely base pragmatical, prosaic way. Is not this thing we have to dissapasionatly conceed credit to because I guess it does useful things like bridges and rockets and computers and taxes. Math is not just the civilizational equivalent of going to the dentist or eating your vegetables.
i hesitate to call it a philosophy or an art, it is a way of human thinking, it is a way of thinking like a human, of thinking in a way that only humans can think. its is one of our oldest and proudest traditions, it is a way to feel greater than onself, it is a way of growing. it is a song with a prosody all its own. There is such a profound sense of meaning and beauty and truth and purpose to be found in math, and the best of all is that it works, when it says something it means something, its telling you a thing that is meaningful, that represents something true, that couldnt be any other way, that has consequences and uses and can be relied upon, that it representes something which carries weight and its ours, its truly a part of our nature, of what we are.
"numbers don't lie" the real numbers are literally a lie group
fun fact! did you know that you can gain extra ‘forbidden time’ by staying up late in the night? but Watch Out
omg I want this so much, I could share my ideas and things I learned
I think tumblr should let us post diagrammes and graphs and tables. We can be trusted with math. I promiss.
rb this with ur opinion on this shade of pink:
foolproof plan
“A lot of math grad school is reading books and papers and trying to understand what’s going on. The difficulty is that reading math is not like reading a mystery thriller, and it’s not even like reading a history book or a New York Times article.
The main issue is that, by the time you get to the frontiers of math, the words to describe the concepts don’t really exist yet. Communicating these ideas is a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you’re only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter.
What can you say?
“It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on in a home tidy.”
That’s certainly better than nothing, but it doesn’t tell you everything you might want to know about a vacuum cleaner. Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean bookshelves? Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean a cat? Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean the outdoors?
The authors of the papers and books are trying to communicate what they’ve understood as best they can under these restrictions, and it’s certainly better than nothing, but if you’re going to have to work with vacuum cleaners, you need to know much more.
Fortunately, math has an incredibly powerful tool that helps bridge the gap. Namely, when we come up with concepts, we also come up with very explicit symbols and notation, along with logical rules for manipulating them. It’s a bit like being handed the technical specifications and diagrams for building a vacuum cleaner out of parts.
The upside is that now you (in theory) can know 100% unambiguously what a vacuum cleaner can or cannot do. The downside is that you still have no clue what the pieces are for or why they are arranged the way they are, except for the cryptic sentence, “It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on in a home tidy.”
OK, so now you’re a grad student, and your advisor gives you an important paper in the field to read: “A Tool that does Suck Dust.” The introduction tells you that “It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on in a home tidy,” and a bunch of other reasonable but vague things. The bulk of the paper is technical diagrams and descriptions of a vacuum cleaner. Then there are some references: “How to use air flow to suck up dust.” “How to use many a coil of wire to make a fan spin very fast.” “What you get from the hole in the wall that has wire in it.”
So, what do you do? Technically, you sit at your desk and think. But it’s not that simple. First, you’re like, lol, that title almost sounds like it could be sexual innuendo. Then you read the introduction, which pleasantly tells you what things are generally about, but is completely vague about the important details.
Then you get to the technical diagrams and are totally confused, but you work through them piece by piece. You redo many of the calculations on your own just to double check that you’ve really understood what’s going on. Sometimes, the calculations that you redo come up with something stupid, and then you have to figure out what you’ve understood incorrectly, and then reread that part of the technical manual to figure things out. Except sometimes there was a typo in the paper, so that’s what screwed things up for you.
After a while, things finally click, and you finally understand what a vacuum cleaner is. In fact, you actually know much more: You’ve now become one of the experts on vacuum cleaners, or at least on this particular kind of vacuum cleaner, and you know a good fraction of the details on how it works. You’re feeling pretty proud of yourself, even though you’re still a far shot from your advisor: They understand all sorts of other kinds of vacuum cleaners, even Roombas, and, in addition to their work on vacuum cleaners, they’re also working on a related but completely different project about air conditioning systems.
You are filled with joy that you can finally talk on par with your advisor, at least on this topic, but there is a looming dark cloud on the horizon: You still need to write a thesis.
So, you think about new things that you can do with vacuum cleaners. So, first, you’re like: I can use a vacuum cleaner to clean bookshelves! That’d be super-useful! But then you do a Google Scholar search and it turns out that someone else did that like ten years ago.
OK, your next idea: I can use a vacuum cleaner to clean cats! That’d also be super-useful. But, alas, a bit more searching in the literature reveals that someone tried that, too, but they didn’t get good results. You’re a confident young grad student, so you decide that, armed with some additional techniques that you happen to know, you might fix the problems that the other researcher had and get vacuuming cats to work. You spend several months on it, but, alas, it doesn’t get you any further.
OK, so then, after more thinking and doing some research on extension cords, you think it would be feasible to use a vacuum cleaner to clean the outdoors. You look in the literature, and it turns out that nobody’s ever thought of doing that! You proudly tell this idea to your advisor, but they do some back of the envelope calculations that you don’t really understand and tell you that vacuuming the outdoors is unlikely to be very useful. Something about how a vacuum cleaner is too small to handle the outdoors and that we already know about other tools that are much better equipped for cleaning streets and such.
This goes on for several years, and finally you write a thesis about how if you turn a vacuum cleaner upside-down and submerge the top end in water, you can make bubbles!
Your thesis committee is unsure of how this could ever be useful, but it seems pretty cool and bubbles are pretty, so they think that maybe something useful could come out of it eventually. Maybe.
And, indeed, you are lucky! After a hundred years or so, your idea (along with a bunch of other ideas) leads to the development of aquarium air pumps, an essential tool in the rapidly growing field of research on artificial goldfish habitats. Yay!”
I loved the quiz! and the result is quite flattering haha
Well…
Looks like I made a uquiz
Try it here
hairy ball theorem, stokes theorem, poincaré duality, nullstellensatz, idk too much to choose one
What is your favourite mathematical theorem? I'm personally torn between the compactness theorem for first-order logic, and the fundamental theorem of Galois theory.
You think math should relate to the real world? What are you, some kind of physicist? Get the fuck out of here
hey netizens! i'm not sure how many people are aware, but youtube's been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can't be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate
BUT, if you're a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard (under My Filters) to get rid of it!
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0) youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, []) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
reblog to help keep the internet less annoying and to tell corporations that try shit like this to go fuck themselves <3
hmmmm idk, this seems like an overgeneralization to me
this whole semester I've been slacking a lot even though I knew I could try harder, but at the same time I felt like even if I give a solid 30% from myself I can still pull it off, so that's what I did. there was no particular reason for it, many times I just didn't feel like studying. I wasn't tired or stressed, if anything I was too relaxed
right now I regret it, while I'm studying for exams I can tell that if I worked more regularly it would be much easier and I would learn much more, but yeah, it seems like I'm going to pass with pretty good grades. however, having had been more systematic I would get better outcomes, especially that I totally had the means to do that. what is this if not pure laziness?
"lazy" is not a negative word in my opinion, or at least it shouldn't be used as such. laziness is when I know I can do better but I choose not to, when I know I can make my future great, but instead I settle for making my future just okay. sometimes there is no underlying reason for it, I simply don't feel like doing more than borderline enough
but that happens sometimes and I think we shouldn't assume that if there is no reason then there must be a hidden reason, because it implies that the natural state of being is working hard and doing your best, which sounds a bit too capitalistic to me. I know for sure that unless there is a reason not to, I will be lazy, and I don't see why this is a bad thing
this was a great read. “Laziness Does Not Exist” by Devon Price
people using a matrix as just a bunch of numbers in a grid or a way to summarize some elaborate calculation instead of a way of notating a linear transformation (or at least a set of points) feels kind of genuinely profane to me. like its one of the only times i feel like i "get" the concept of the profane. how could you do that to her
funfact: in poland nobody really cares about eye contact, maybe other than people who want to have an intimate conversation with you like you'd have during a date or something
I was genuinely suprised when I learned that avoiding eye contact is a symptom of autism, because I didn't notice anybody ever trying to make it. I started paying attention to this whole thing after my diagnosis, where the doctor asked if I always look at the walls while talking to people. it turns out that people indeed are trying to look into my eyes even during the most mundane and routine interactions, but nobody (other than my now ex boyfriend who was so sad when he found out that I perceive eye contact as a threat) ever pointed it out as something that I should do. but then I see (presumably american or just non-polish) people talking about being offended by someone not making eye contact and I experience a massive cultural shock lol
girl i am not looking at your tits i prommy i just hate eye contact
Astronaut sculpture from an ex-physicist (Source/Credit)
this is going to be difficult -> i am capable of doing difficult things -> i have done everything prior to this moment -> this difficulty will soon be proof of capability
lmao I just imagined a situation in which someone wrote me a message about math (is math a fandom?) and after realizing that I am an adult decided that talking to me about math is suddenly dangerous, kinda funny
on a serious note, I don't have anything to add, the responses above do a very good job at showing why this is an insane thing to expect from people
@ my fellow adults who use tumblr a lot:
can you PLEASE put your age in your about/sidebar and make sure it’s accessible on mobile. imo if you’re an adult esp 20+ it’s a little weird that you wouldn’t have your age readily available on your blog. if you’re reading this now and you don’t have your age listed, please rectify that. i feel like teenagers get lured into talking to adults in fandom/lgbt spaces that they may not have intentionally sought out because they think they’re talking to other teenagers, and this can lead to a lot of other – much more insidious –problems
homotopy groups of fucking spheres
I'm still salty about this half a decade later.
What was the most upsetting result in mathematics for you?
thank you @dressedsalad @bsdndprplplld and @rooksacrifice for nominations. the last two were my additions (to provide more variety in the choices, not bc I dislike them)
lmao wtf people seriously say shit like "math is homophobic"? because queer people can't do math… a priori?? isn't it inherently homophobic to claim that homosexuality implies being bad at math? this is the most unhinged thing I've seen this week
It's so funny to me when people reblog math posts on this site and say shit like "this is homophobic" "this is an attack on queer people" like hello this is tumblr. OP is queer. Like we've got a HANDFUL of cishets here on mathblr but most of us are queer. Because it's tumblr. And everyone is queer on tumblr. If you see math on this site, a queer person probably put it there. Stfu about "gays can't do math" if it's on tumblr, gays can do it, that's why it's on tumblr.
And of course there is also a large and brilliant and beloved queer math community off of tumblr but I just think it's extra funny when people don't notice it ON TUMBLR.
Alan Turing didn't kick the Nazis' collective ass laying foundations for the field of computing and then go on to also lay foundations for the field of biomathematics, Leonardo Da Vinci didn't give us fundamental physical and mathematical diagrams used in engineering well beyond his time, Moon Duchin doesn't study the math of fair redistricting, Chad Topaz and Jude Higdon don't analyze criminal sentencing disparities, et cetera et cetera, for y'all to call math homophobic and an attack on the queer community.
also I don't get what "bad representation" is supposed to mean. given a number of symptoms and creating a character that has those symptom, it is almost certain that there exists an autistic person who will relate to that character, which is what the representation is for, no?
I've seen people making fun of the main character in the good doctor and saying that he's a bad representation, but the whole "I am a surgeon" situation is the most relatable thing I have ever seen in a show, so to me it's doing its job as a representation
how can someone simultaneously claim the existence of a "bad representation" and that every autistic person is different? it doesn't make sense to me
You can ask for more diverse autistic representation in media and criticize the current without making fun of the "stereotypical" traits autistic characters show because, you know, many of us do have these traits. And we're not faking it, and we are not stereotypes, and our traits and interest are not something to be ashamed of.
mathermatical notation explained
symbol meaning
= equals
=/= not equals
< left
> right
! LOUD NUMBER
~ worm
π stonehenge
√ right answer
x wrong answer
⋯ soon…
∮ what Exacrly the fuck
∝ fish
∞ fish with 2 heads
↯ lightning
:⇔ he Scream
you know girls can tell when you look at their boobs
i don’t care how quickly you glance, 1 second is like 5 seconds in boob time
so, for relativistic boobtime, where t is the observer, and t’ is the time measured at the boob. t=t’/sqrt(1-(v/c)^2) solving for t=1, and t’=5, we get that the boobspeed, v, is represented by v=+/- (6*10^8)sqrt(6)i m/s
boobs travel at 1.5 gigametres per second in the complex direction.
if you don't want to learn tikz but still need them arrows, check out quiver. it's super useful for complicated and unconventional diagrams
Learning LaTex has been a way more pleasant experience than I thought it would be this stuff is way simpler than it looks and the results fuck hard
don't forget about "you're gaslighting me" whenever you do something that they don't like. this is the slang word that I probably find the most annoying recently, I've never seen it used correctly. it's always the situation when someone does something under the influence of emotions and when confronted they say that it's gasligthing lmao shut up
brb gonna go on a spiral thinking abt this all weekend (bc i think its insanely true)