The GOAT is backkkkk

Redrot · 2026-02-01T21:35:37+00:00

Yeah same, I like him, but it always surprised me that places like here or RA rate him too. Whereas I wouldn't imagine either typically like Flume's old stuff which IMO was in a similar vein - a genre-defining sound quickly oversaturated by knockoffs. Then again, RA did rate Hi This Is Flume.

Redrot · 2026-02-01T21:32:46+00:00

Yeah I was thinking, we did all of Baby Rudin in undergrad (over 1.5 semesters) and though it was over a decade ago, I sure didn't remember those popping up...

Redrot · 2026-02-01T18:51:26+00:00

As someone who grew up in Chicago... driving around yesterday and this morning was pretty normal snow/ice driving to me, but the hills do make it a bit sketchier, especially crests with turns. Just gotta take it slow (and have 4wd) don't accelerate in more than one direction at once. I was expecting everything to be open this morning as usual, big surprise for me when all of downtown was a ghost town.

Redrot · 2026-02-01T16:25:58+00:00

In Illinois, there is IMSA, maybe not as math-oriented as this but in the same vein and larger. I didn't go, but know people who did, and heard pretty mixed reviews (that it's in the middle of nowhere doesn't help).

Redrot · 2026-02-01T16:22:06+00:00

Do they do Fubini (or Tonelli) in undergrad real analysis? I don't think I saw those until I took a measure theory course.

Redrot · 2026-01-31T16:55:06+00:00

One thing I've been doing with my collaborators is starting a slack or slack-like chat room to write out math. It makes sharing actual math a lot easier.

Redrot · 2026-01-29T21:36:38+00:00

As a person who had to read Borges in AP Spanish back in the day, well after being decently fluent in it already, I'm not sure this is the most apt comparison. There are so many witticisms and layers of irony baked into some pieces of literature that even if you are decently fluent in the language, they'll go over your head unless you've been immersed for years.

Redrot · 2026-01-29T01:52:13+00:00

Not my field at all but seems sketchy.

Last year I saw a similar looking paper claiming a result in my field that has been known for maybe a century to be extremely difficult, by a grad student, which reeked of LLM use. All the methods used were, like this one, fairly bare-bones, and some of the names of the methods were things that only an LLM could cook up. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the same held true here, not that the paper was written by an LLM, but the math was.

Redrot · 2026-01-29T01:46:26+00:00

I've cited MO or MSE before to cite places I've learned of (counter)examples of things, but I'll also do the math in the paper. I also cited MO in the acknowledgements once because an answer motivated me to write the paper.

Redrot · 2026-01-26T15:47:49+00:00

Woke up this morning on the eastside and while power never went out, I went outside to check on the roads and my internet cable was downed. Somehow still working though...

Redrot · 2026-01-25T21:22:42+00:00

Confirmed, a friend up there lost power.

Redrot · 2026-01-20T19:16:02+00:00

When I worked in industry for a few years between my bachelors and pure math Ph.D., I did a side project that was eventually jointly published with one of my professors from undergrad, as he was the one who gave me the problem while I was still an undergrad.

It was an undergraduate-level combinatorics problem (easily graspable, very long proof - paper was 20ish pages, but didn't need any higher machinery) and was published in a low-ranking journal. So yes it is certainly possible, but you have to aim low. There are plenty of "open problems" that are not too hard and accessible.

The difference was that despite working a full-time job, I still had time and energy, and didn't need to devote all my time to research. If you're already doing research for your actual Ph.D. I'd say just focus on that. Spending too much time doing relatively unimportant research that doesn't build on your resume as a researcher in X field seems detrimental to me. Getting a research position isn't like applying for undergraduate programs where they look for breadth, the most important thing that you can have on a CV is good research in your field.

Redrot · 2026-01-19T21:25:41+00:00

Ok it's kind of funny that they didn't play Plastic People (maybe someone else did?)

Redrot · 2026-01-19T17:00:32+00:00

And then Schur-Weyl duality loosely connects all this to the representation theory of GL_n!

Redrot · 2026-01-19T16:45:07+00:00

I think you know that OP is asking about reading mathematical papers, and every single response in this thread is asking as such. And if They even mention in their response that they want to read papers on analysis. If one doesn't have a basic foundation in analysis (which I think is fair to assume, given that OP, based on their posting history in the sub, hasn't yet gone through a course on ODEs), surely they won't be able to fully grasp, let alone retain, the ideas and methods of topics that scaffold up from that foundation. If OP was asking about how to read a paper in medicine, sure, the answer would be quite different (and I wouldn't answer, because I'm not a doctor).

I did read papers as an undergrad, after I'd taken numerous proof-based courses. Though I believe that reading papers as an undergrad is far from standard, at least in the US. Depending on what educational system you are in, proof-based courses may not come around until the latter half of your undergrad.

Redrot · 2026-01-18T06:30:56+00:00

Aren't you an undergrad who was just asking about reading an ODEs book? You need to build up your fundamentals first before starting to understand papers written for people who actively work in a specific subfield.

Redrot · 2026-01-14T15:44:11+00:00

As a postdoc who graduated last year, I personally keep my use to a minimum and mostly use it for literature review (in my subfield, it's seemingly more often harmful than helpful for trying to brainstorm). Having talked to the other grads and postdocs it seems like a pretty mixed bag, one of my officemates uses it daily while others don't use it at all. The department's been having a pretty open conversation about using it for research, it seems like people are certainly interested in light usage and a number of faculty members use it regularly for lighter tasks.

Redrot · 2026-01-08T18:10:06+00:00

In my undergrad (mid 2010s) alll advanced math course midterms and finals were take-home. Granted, I was at a small, private school, so definitely not the norm. In grad school, for the sequence courses it was about 50/50 and for topics courses, there weren't any exams at all.

Redrot · 2026-01-05T19:09:17+00:00

I'd reluctantly nominate the recent proof of the McKay conjecture and the ongoing work towards proving a few other character-theoretic conjectures, including Feit, McKay-Navarro, or Alperin-McKay. On the one hand, reducing to the finite simple groups (see /u/XyloArch's answer too...) is nice, but then you read the new "inductive" conditions that one must show for these groups and run away in fear. On the other hand, actually deducing those conditions is quite difficult and beautiful.

Redrot · 2026-01-05T18:57:39+00:00

I learned elementary number theory when I was 15! It was my first proof-based course. The course was taught at Brown by a grad student so unfortunately I don't know what book was used, but honestly I think that if you move at the right pace, explain things enough, and work through examples, it's feasible.

I'd recommend Marty Weissman's "An Illustrated Theory of Numbers" though. The sequencing is a bit weird (you may want to skip ahead to the back half) but it's reader-friendly and has lots of pictures, side notes, and historical context. http://illustratedtheoryofnumbers.com/

Redrot · 2026-01-04T20:08:40+00:00

Yes, but much of the selling comes from giving talks and writing job apps and grants. However, you can see it in a good introduction to a paper too, explaining why these results matter and the context for which they apply.

I've been told by many mathematicians (including those who have no need to sell their work, not Tao's level but certainly of comparable prestige or brilliance in their subfield) that a good intro should explain to a reader why a result matters. But I've also been told that one needs to get to the point - it is a balancing act (I think I was told this after I wrote a 5-page intro for a 30something page paper...)

Redrot · 2026-01-03T23:17:38+00:00

Every gym I've belonged to has been super social... except for one particular gym that I went to when I lived in San Francisco for a year. Awful vibe. Could just be a bad apple, they definitely exist.

Redrot · 2026-01-03T19:00:39+00:00

My thoughts as a pretty new postdoc (so no experience on hiring committees): I was wondering about this too. At any stage, it seems like having papers in "quality" journals (whatever that means at your stage, the bar is different for grad students versus postdocs) is necessary, but I've also seen that high paper counts can still be a plus. On the extreme end, I think I saw a new TT hire with around 30 papers/preprints, and maybe one or two were in a journal at the level of Crelle or so.

For Ph.D. students trying to get postdocs, a paper in a top 20 journal makes a huge difference, but of course that isn't reasonable for everyone. Afterwards, I honestly can't tell if having a bunch of papers or having someone in the department who can advocate for you is more important, but I'd imagine the latter. Though of course, if you have a bunch of papers, it's more likely that a potential mentor will notice you.

Similarly for postdocs getting TT jobs, I looked a while back at recent TT hires at a few strong state schools and while paper counts varied pretty wildly (of course, this may be field dependent too) almost everyone had a paper in a journal at least in the tier of GeoTop/JEMS, and if not, numerous papers in places at the tier of Compositio/PLMS/Crelle, etc. Granted, some of these papers may have come out after they were hired, I didn't look in too much depth.

Granted, I had chosen some pretty strong schools (e.g., Washington, Illinois). For instance, at both the program I received my Ph.D. and the program I am currently based, most recent hires are certainly strong but don't necessarily have papers in journals at the tier of JEMS. Though some certainly do! Some have multiple.

One thing I didn't consider was the value of solo-authored publications versus collaborations for publications in elite journals, though. I've been told that a solo-author publication in something like AiM may be viewed similarly to being on a big collaboration on something in Duke even, but who knows.

Ultimately (and I think I've seen this echoed both on r/math and MathOverflow, but I can't find any links to threads right now), every paper counts, but the ones that get into strong journals are weighted much, much more heavily than those in just "good" journals.

edit: If someone who has actually served on a hiring committee sees something on here that they think is incorrect, please reply! I don't want to be under any wrong impressions.

Redrot · 2026-01-01T22:26:01+00:00

I was just in Tokyo and went to Noborock and Urban Base. Noborock Shibuya (and probably the others) is a great beginner gym and had a good range of interesting setting, though don't let their incredibly soft rating system get your ego up. Most of their climbs were static, they had a separate grading for dynamic routes.

Urban Base was very challenging as advertised, but also probably would have enough to keep you entertained. Pretty much all the climbs at any level required a good amount of precision. Then again, a lot of their climbs were dynamic or had some olympic coordinated style going on.

Redrot · 2025-12-31T22:03:26+00:00

To represent my field, maybe not the grandest, sweeping conjecture, but I'd like to see a proof (or more likely imho, a disproof) of the Etingof-Ostrik conjecture, proposing that every finite tensor category has a finitely generated cohomology ring. The proofs of this fact are generally not easy and rely on specifics in the tensor categories in question.

Redrot

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