David Bessis
@davidbessis
Rogue mathematician. "The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding." — Bill Thurston
Why you can't fit Terry Tao on a bell curve, and why genius is too extreme for genetic determinism.⤵️
When two Fields Medalists, Terence Tao & Hugo Copin, declare a book a “must-read,” it is undoubtedly a masterpiece. @davidbessis, a leading mathematician, invested two decades of his life to distill profound wisdom into this work, which I describe as a “scheme of mathematization”
On the practical reality of teaching mathematics- Math itself is simple but the mental action that allow us to make sense of it are subtle and counterintuitive. These actions are invisible. We can’t simply imitate what others do.
"Developing good mental habits, adopting the right psychological attitude, can make you a billion times better at math. But the method for becoming good at math has never been taught in schools…" - @davidbessis, Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity (2024)
I have just read Mathematica by @davidbessis in basically one sitting. Exhilarating. Most provocative book I’ve read in a long time. It’s about education, the brain, thinking how to move through life, and along the way, some math.
The worst hires? Talented yet viciously political people. It takes 18 months to uncover the magnitude of the disaster: you trusted them and you shouldn't have, it was a con from day 1. 18 months into working daily with LLMs, I'm getting the same exact feeling.
My "Math, Revealed" series is freely available to anyone -- no paywall! -- in the thread below
Matematik o kadar da zor değildir! | Burak Soyer @SayYayinlari David Bessis, “Matematik Herkes İçindir” kitabında, birçok kişi için sıkıcı bir zorunluluktan öte gitmeyen matematiğin insanların zihnindeki bu olumsuz imajını silen, ilham veren bir perspektifle yaklaşıp gündelik…
How I woke up one day and decided to solve a math conjecture from the 1970s ⤵️
"There are only two kinds of modern math books: Those you cannot read beyond the first sentence, and those you cannot read beyond the first page" - C.N. Yang (Nobel laureate in Physics)
The fact that education increases intelligence is one of the most heretical ideas one can post on X and the response is fascinating. Below is a verbatim quote from the largest meta-analysis to date; the author literally wrote a book on intelligence. Let's see how people take it:
Education is "the most consistent, robust, and durable method yet to be identified for raising intelligence" (journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…), as has been demonstrated with a multitude of study designs, genetic/non-genetic analyses, and even lifelong data.
"The motherland, my friends, is not the president's ass that has to be slobbered and kissed all the time, the motherland is an impoverished old woman at the train station selling potatoes." Yuri Shevchuk has poetic talent AND balls.
The underlying distribution is a bell curve, like most distributions. Bell curves always produce this shape of sigmoid when plotted in this strange way. It’s nothing usual about life span in particular.