To Calculate and Live

if there's one thing ive learned from my math education it's the ability to judge a textbook by it's cover:

fancy cover with actual picture, fewer than 15 years old, $300: absolute dogshit. time wasting exercises, poor exposition, that weird gloss they put on the pages probably makes it too toxic to use as kindling

title is just name of subject, referred to by author, 50 years old with like 3 editions: excellent. compact proofs, exercises good enough people refer to them by number in conversation. available for free by foraging somewhere they grow naturally

title is some shit like paul's notes, "cover" is just default latex titlepage, distributed as pdf to grad classes or by advisor: best coverage of whatever (usually niche) topic it's about in the world. crystal clear exposition. solutions to exercises available by emailing grad students working under author

f(x) tribute band called f'(x). you'd think the point would be to be derivative but it's actually quite easy to differentiate the two.

no

yeah :)

haha yayyyy :) i'm having such a wonderful time on the internet with you

why can’t we just let epsilon be zero it clearly wants to

When you combine yaoi and yuri you get straight porn but if you introduce a phase shift of π/2 then the result is bisexual porn there will be a quiz on this on Monday

Everyone's out here talking about love triangles but no one is willing to do the trigonometry

The fact that boygirl adequately explains my gender but girlboy does not implies that gender is noncommutative. I’d be surprised if it was associative too.

Okay hear me out:

Took me until about halfway through college before I realized “study” means “play with the material in a variety of ways until you understand it” and not just “read the assigned chapters and do the homework” and I think that probably should have been discussed at some point prior to that.

good advice from @transmechanicus

I'm in need of advice and I'm desperate so I've come to you Tumblr please help me

I'm currently a data scientist for a very small start up company, but I have my background in political science and so I'm concerned that I might be dead in the water if/when the company goes under and I need to find another job. I've consulted with some recruiters and they agree that if I want to go into data science I should get my master's. I think because of my personality, data science is a really good job for me, so I'm planning on going for it.

Here's the issue: I don't want to go to school and end up learning exclusively theory. I've been teaching myself a ton by reading textbooks and I've noticed that while there's a lot of depth in the math/calculus/linear algebra behind how the functions work and what the parameters are, there seems to be very little information on how to actually apply that information in the real world. Obviously the math is important and very exciting :D but if all I do is learn the math and I don't learn how to apply the knowledge I have to non-ideal data sets and situations then I'm not really learning the information I need to know.

Are there any graduate programs that are well known for really preparing people for data science roles in the workforce instead of just focusing on the academic side of statistics?

I have to have like 10 karma on the data science subreddit to post and the other subs I asked didn't have any answers;-;

There definitely exist grad programs which are explicitly in applied math, or have an applied math concentration. Many students in my grad school (University of Minnesota) are on the applied track and many of them go into industry jobs. I think the grad program at Clemson is more applied than pure with lots of people going into industry. These are the two I know more about off the top of my head because they are the schools I had to choose between when I picked a school, but there are many other programs that are explicitly applied.

You'll also find "data science boot camp" type programs, I know some people who've done them and benefited from them but I don't know a ton about them.

Given your background in polisci you might reach out to the Institute for Math and Democracy, and/or Chad Topaz at QSIDE- these institutions I believe basically have ongoing collaborative research projects using data science applied to polisci/similar so you might learn from getting involved in their projects and/or they may be able to give you advice. I know people at both of those places if you want help reaching out.

I'm gonna tag people who might know more than me. (Probably will know more than me. I'm in rather pure math.) Also maybe my followers will have ideas.

@tarilaran @counter-example @hurricane-euler

Wish I could tag the-real-numbers but he deactivated but I'll text him and see if he has ideas and I'll report back

Colin Adams on 4- and 5-dimensional knots

illustrations by Christine Heinitz and Thomas Banchoff

A lot of these are more relevant if you're pre-computer and the way you do trig functions is by looking them up in a big careful table. If you're computing 1/sin(x) it saves a step to just look up csc(x)

is any of this useful, fuck no, but i had fun typing it. aand post 😎

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.

Reblog this and tell me about the important contributions other queer mathematicians are making to the field and to the world

They had a queering the Fields Institute day:

Four great mathematicians, linking to their talks.

Spectra is a great organization. Their outlist is a testimony to queerness is not necessarily a barrier to math achievement. Though plenty of barriers remain. The difference from when I started is appreciable, but not far enough.

system of mathematical notation where concatenation always means multiplication and each prime number has a unique one digit symbol. so counting to ten looks like "2, 3, 22, 5, 23, 7, 222, 33, 25". the advantages of this system would be making multiplication and division trivial, as well as accurately representing the true form and identity of every positive integer according to the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. the disadvantages to this system would be everything

I don't know who out there needs to hear this but your brain does this amazing little -shift- when something seems to make sense in a new way and it's very addictive and euphoric and totally reliant on the *appearance* of logical conclusions, not actual objective truth

So that bizarre transcendent high you get when the idea of "reality shifting" or "crystal vibrations" or like. Whatever the hell that "manifesting" shit is, when it -clicks- for you, and its like suddenly the entire fabric of reality suddenly makes sense?

That's not a sign that you've unlocked the intangible secrets of the universe. That's a sign that your brain is hardwired to find and exploit logical shortcuts and loopholes and patterns and it thinks it just found one, so you got hopeful and excited and wondrous and received a dopamine hit on top.

And really, I'd just keep my thoughts to myself, except I've experienced these false-positive "revelations" before too, and looking around there is a concerning amount of fake-spititual not-medicine junk being pushed around, opening people up to predatory cults and pyramid schemes that are doing very, very well and it's really fucking scary

And like.

Soft animal brains make mistakes. that's normal. It's why we invented science. Please take your meds and use your aids and get vaccinated. Please

@wizardlyghost bless

Not to derail the tiktok cult commentary but “when something seems to make sense in a new way and it’s very addictive and euphoric” is exactly why people study math! This is such a great description of that feeling

Unfortunately getting to the dopamine hit by understanding math concepts is a lot harder than “realizing” you’re an alien ugly duckling or whatever

whenever I see a “like if you have opinion A, reblog if you have opinion B” post I get really annoyed because that’s clearly a horrible way to give a survey only people of opinion B spread it to their followers it’s selection bias I’m so disappointed in your data gathering methods

Been seeing “reblog for bigger sample size” and it’s definitely not as egregious as tumblr polls pre-polls…

It’s made me curious about the biases of survey via graph rather than randomness… do more-connected nodes (who reblog) effectively have a more powerful vote? Are popular users the Wyoming* voters of tumblr?

Otoh this only holds if users are likely to vote similarly to people they follow, which seems like it would be the case for some but not all poll topics.

*Due to the US electoral college, a vote from Wyoming is worth something like 3 times a vote from California in presidential elections.

i'm glad that this post is reaching the right people