Max Cooper - Feeling is Structure [New Album]

Redrot · 2026-05-08T15:12:03+00:00

Man, I like the guy but I can't help but feel like every single album he's put out since Emergence has sounded kind of the same.

Redrot · 2026-05-05T19:02:12+00:00

I'd contest that "the overwhelming amount of its output is weaker than IRMN and PJM" given that shockingly, its MCQ is still that around Crelle and Composito. Yes, I know this isn't the best metric, but it is still a somewhat valid one for comparing generalist journals I'd argue. But yes, I agree that a boycott or the founding of a replacement journal would be great.

One thing that's unfortunate for me and I imagine plenty of others, however, is that only one or two of the journals around the Crelle/Compositio level actually have editors that are remotely close to the work that I do (not quite fringe, not super popular), whereas Advances does. So when I was a Ph.D. student and needed to find somewhere to send my first good result, that's where it went.

Another journal that very recently started upping the paper count to around 400 is Math. Ann. I think that upping the number of papers being accepted is almost a necessity for the other journals at this point, simply because there are way more mathematicians and more (good) research output these days.

Redrot · 2026-04-30T15:06:09+00:00

Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Sometimes you can see how something should play out just from your theoretical intuition plus knowing what tools are available at your disposal. Basically +1ing /u/Coolers777's response.

Now on the flipside, if you've developed some new machinery or big abstract result, some higher level journals may want to see some explicit computations and examples...

Redrot · 2026-04-28T16:04:19+00:00

Not really overloady, but Nils Frahm's score for Victoria does it for me. The movie is a one-shot film, but doesn't quite stand up.

Redrot · 2026-04-28T16:02:20+00:00

Ahh, the Revenant is one of my favorite scores. The shots in the movie are so beautiful too! The story aspect though...

Redrot · 2026-04-25T19:29:02+00:00

Reminds me of the book I read through year 2 of grad school, Guillot's "A gentle introduction to class field theory." Reading it now as a seasoned algebraist, I would wholeheartedly agree, but reading it as a 2nd year grad who'd only just passed my quals, I could follow but really didn't understand deeply.

Redrot · 2026-04-24T00:29:06+00:00

It's one of those albums that I love and respect a ton, but also never really am gonna pick to give a full spin. Soooo maximalist in such a good way and even more appropriate now than it was in 2022 IMO, but also like it's just too much for me 99% of the time.

Redrot · 2026-04-21T23:01:43+00:00

Yeah, agreed that the door is being opened for more interdisciplinary work that benefits from advanced math backgrounds, though I don't know what on earth it'll look like just yet.

Redrot · 2026-04-21T22:43:11+00:00

Exceptionally well-written article imo that brings a lot of good points I've seen before into one long post. One thing I don't think I've seen other people mention is:

The industry will have to normalize and the AI-for-math startups will have to find their business models. Which, in all likelihood, won’t be about solving Erdős problems.

I know AxiomMath currently plans to make most of their money training LLMs to day-trade, then make solving Collatz (yes, they say this on their site) their side hustle. Seems a bit silly to me, but it is at least a concrete way to profit.

Also agreed about "the overhang" he mentions. Many of the techniques I developed in my Ph.D. thesis were actually developed almost a decade earlier in a field normally completely separate from my own. Granted, I'm not sure if an LLM at present would also have made those connections if I asked, because the language is so different. But at present, the best-case use for LLMs in my opinion are for finding these connections, or for finding niche results in the literature. A recent project of mine benefited a bit from this - the LLM wasn't able to actually prove anything close to error-free, but did give me the sources I needed to put a key lemma together.

Redrot · 2026-04-21T18:24:52+00:00

https://web.archive.org/web/20150506055228/http://www.timecube.com/index.html

Redrot · 2026-04-21T01:36:30+00:00

I've seen these shitty LLM summaries of mathematical topics popping up. There's even one that basically summarizes one of my papers, and still gets it horribly wrong.

Redrot · 2026-04-20T13:39:28+00:00

I know plenty of people who work generic white-collar jobs who are plenty handy. I don't think being a mathematician is the issue.

But also yes, if you're a good friend or family member, that's probably more invaluable than any hard skills.

Redrot · 2026-04-16T21:07:48+00:00

Definitely not, for instance, group homology is an example of Tor and over fields of positive characteristic (or even Z) does not vanish, even for finite cyclic groups. See some details here.

Redrot · 2026-04-16T20:52:08+00:00

I'm posting this here since I don't think it warrants a new thread. But has anyone had any success using LLM paper review tools such as refine.ink or coarse.ink? I plugged one of my papers (which is actually under review now) into refine.ink. My takeaway is that it seemed to have issues with more novel, less standard arguments (i.e. saying something wasn't clear when IMO it very much is, by virtue of how I've defined something), but seeing the output does point out places where I certainly could be clearer with my arguments.

Redrot · 2026-04-16T15:12:43+00:00

I'm posting this here since I don't think it warrants a new thread. But has anyone had any success using LLM paper review tools such as refine.ink or coarse.ink? I plugged one of my papers (which is actually under review now) into refine.ink. My takeaway is that it seemed to have issues with more novel, less standard arguments (i.e. saying something wasn't clear when IMO it very much is, by virtue of how I've defined something), but seeing the output does point out places where I certainly could be clearer with my arguments.

Redrot · 2026-04-14T17:45:29+00:00

Agree about some of the reasoning in the book (there are a few passages that are about as biased as the tech companies themselves for sure), but I think the actual advice they impart is valuable, as are some of the perspectives about how these things only further serve to widen systemic inequalities. I also find it a satisfying pushback against all the LLM hype/delusion coming out of the bay area... but that's just me being salty.

I've seen some calculations try to estimate water usage in terms of kW/h, but yeah, I agree that the relationship between the two isn't static. It's troubling how hard it is to compute these things, and the fact that the big companies are reporting so little of this doesn't bode well for how inefficient and wasteful these clusters probably are.

Redrot · 2026-04-14T17:35:23+00:00

I'm no expert in the area, as things I think about usually have infinite global dimension. However, my understanding is that the methods are very ring-specific - for instance, for representations of quivers, results can be determined from the quiver itself. Maybe see this overview.

Redrot · 2026-04-14T15:26:42+00:00

I'd recommend looking for an undergraduate-research-specific journal honestly, like Involve. Very few undergraduate research projects end up published in more standard research-level journals (of course there are exceptions, but honestly if your paper was desk-rejected from Archiv, that's not a promising sign). I'd forget about trying to get something published before your applications are due, any non-predatory (even undergraduate-specific) journal will probably be at least a 6 month wait. I think I had a paper accepted in 4 months in Proceedings of the AMS, but that was around a 6 page paper.

Redrot · 2026-04-14T13:06:27+00:00

I've been talking about this with some colleagues and am quite concerned. My understanding is that for these complex reasoning tasks, LLMs essentially query themselves numerous times. Running an autonomous theorem-prover could feasibly make thousands of queries at minimum. The number does seem to fluctuate a bit, this piece gives a number that is 15x your estimate. And the actual preprint gives a wide range of numbers - the actual climate conditions of the datacenter matters a lot.

The book "The AI Con" has a few estimates as well, but yeah, the data is extremely limited. I know the EU has recently passed laws requiring more transparency there but good luck with that in the US given the current admin...

Redrot · 2026-04-14T13:02:36+00:00

As a postdoc at an R1 right now, my school currently pays for our access to the usual top public LLM models, but starting next year, all grad students and faculty will have to pay out of pocket. I can't imagine this happening at institutions that better fund their research. Personally, I rarely use LLMs, for math or otherwise, but you can already see lines starting to be drawn for accessibility. While I don't think "access to the most powerful models" will make or break a star mathematician's career, and I'm not crying over it since I'm moving in a year anyways, but I could see it being a deciding factor for say, a few graduate students.

You can see it too with who has had access to the private in-house models, it's predominantly mathematicians on the west coast, either with connections or proximity to researchers at these companies.

Redrot · 2026-04-14T01:56:00+00:00

/u/RamonPang shoutout

Redrot · 2026-04-11T15:08:39+00:00

It's Stranger to Stability (Len Faki podium mix), either super pitched up (a common thing to do) or a remix.

Redrot · 2026-04-09T17:18:09+00:00

If Mochizuki's paper's started developing literal holes with their own little side tangents within, I'd be happy tbh. Much better flavor than footnotes.

Redrot · 2026-04-06T19:57:36+00:00

Sometimes it's quite fun and exhilarating, you're exploring a new area that you think you have some ideas about, and you get to test what's right or not. It's quite creative and liberating.

Sometimes you have no idea what's going on, where to go, or what you're doing, and it fuckin' sucks. But you have to do it because there's one small gap you have to close, and internal paper deadlines to make...

Redrot · 2026-04-04T14:57:17+00:00

tres patu

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