Greg Egan

When Cara Leon goes missing, Sam Mujrif is hired to investigate. Cara is 8 times taller than Sam, but evidence points to players much smaller than either of them—and technology with the potential to radically alter the balance of power between the scales. gregegan.net/SCALE/SCALE.ht…

As a longtime humanitarian who has battled famines and hunger crises, I fear that starvation in Gaza has now passed the tipping point and we are going to see mass-scale starvation mortality. A thread on famine momentum, famine response, and what it means for Gaza today.

In the Euclidean plane, lattices can only have exact rotational symmetry under rotations of 180, 120, 90 or 60 degrees. In the Lorentzian plane, lattices can be constructed that are symmetric under “boosts” with parameter arccosh(n/2) for any integer n>2. For this lattice, n=3.

Caroline Willemen is our project coordinator for Gaza City, in the north of Gaza, Palestine. She updates us on the consequences of food shortages ⬇️ “Many patients across Gaza's healthcare facilities are no longer receiving food; the situation is more desperate than ever.…

One worry I have is that AI tools will develop their ability to produce hard-to-check, convincing mathematical prose more rapidly than their ability to produce correct answers. If so I suspect we will soon see a deluge of persuasive-looking, incorrect results.

So, Avi has responded to this, and he is doubling down. It's a bit unclear, but the best I can figure is he thinks the images of a coma are from shift-and-stacking minutes-long exposures. I emailed him privately to explain how non-sidereal tracking works. He has not responded.

Speaking as a past IMO contestant, this is impressive but misleading - gold vs silver is meaningless, 1 pt below gold vs borderline gold is noise The impressive bit is using a general reasoning model, not a specialised system, and no verified reward. Peak AI maths is unchanged

In the last month there have been at least 3 (nonsense) papers on the Hodge conjecture posted to arXiv that I am 99% sure are LLM-generated, complete with hallucinated citations, etc. Very obnoxious to pollute the commons this way.

Some aspects of AI discourse seem to come from a different planet, oblivious to basic realities on Earth. AI for science is one such area. In this new essay, @sayashk and I argue that visions of accelerating science through AI should be considered unserious if they don't confront…

Best look yet at Comet 3I/ATLAS, the interstellar visitor that's racing through our solar system. It's currently 600 million kilometers from the Sun, between Jupiter & the asteroid belt. As the comet moves closer, the images will inevitably get better. noirlab.edu/public/news/no…

The triangle numbers: T(k) = 1 + 2 + ... + k obey an identity: (2n+1)^2 T(k) + T(n) = T(k(2n+1) + n) which can be seen here geometrically.

I've been chatting with LLMs recently about classical modular forms, mostly o3 and gemini 2.5 pro. They seem to have strong and very sticky and totally false beliefs about congruence subgroups being generated by their upper + lower triangular subgroups,