Noah Snyder Profile
Noah Snyder

@NoahJSnyder

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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
"This may be a graduate class, but it's still called Algebra, so we're doing the quadratic formula on the first day!" --me, apparently
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 months
@jacktr1al Took me a second to realize this wasn't referring to the Zodiac killer, Ted Cruz.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@mattyglesias Come on Matt, I know you’ve watched The Americans.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
5 years
@MaryRobinette @jcberk See also blackboard height in nearly every college classroom.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@normative You have no idea how much people struggle with fractions. Probability so much harder than algebra. And I literally don't know what people mean by "statistics" for students who don't what the graph of a function means.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@_R_S_S_ @AlecMacGillis Um... It was embraced and acted on back then too. Wilson segregated the federal government. Indiana Klan members won a majority of the assembly and the governor's office in the early 1920s. Etc. It's called the "Nadir of American race relations" for a reason.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
9 months
@katiedimartin Canadians think the war of 1812 was when Canada beat the US, and Americans have no idea that the war of 1812 involved Canada in any way.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@wtgowers Are they just asking to come up with *some* set of 5 with that property? That would be a good question phrased poorly.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@mattyglesias This is the key to the Electoral College distortion. Just a truly enormous number of votes that don’t count for anything.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@wtgowers The only other thing I can think of is that they forgot that the mean doesn’t have to be in the set?
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@rainnwilson Serious answer: the metro area is Champaign-Urbana because Champaign is bigger, but the university is Urbana-Champaign because the main campus is in Urbana.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@MenInBlazers Watching Werner really makes you appreciate Zardes.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
1 month
@littmath Is there a version of this that says that if you have two teams with the same expected goal differential (or maybe I want a ratio and not a difference?), then the one with better defense wins more games?
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
1 year
@MenInBlazers Should be green, goes with the traffic light theme of the other two cards.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@normative It actually happened in Canada in 1995 that a right wing MP attacked funding for “Lie theory” (named after 19th century Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie) because we shouldn’t be studying lies.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@kdrum @mattyglesias Stay home until the Omicron wave is over. That's what I'm doing.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
9 months
@mattyglesias But every five years or so it’s very exciting and close before Dortmund dramatically screws it up at the end.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@JSEllenberg This is how I ended up as an NPC in one of my Calc worksheet groups D&D campaign. ("The villain chooses epsilon!")
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
9 months
@mattyglesias When everyone knows this loophole only lets you do crimes with impunity in the part of Yellowstone National Park inside of Idaho:
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@mattyglesias Would be a better idea if it also unified the Dakotas.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
1 year
New paper! With Nate Harman and Andrew Snowden. A symmetric tensor categories is something that "looks like" the category of representations of a group. You have some "representations" and maps between them, with a notion of tensor product and dual reps.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
6 years
@kfergyferg3 @mikemuon @mattyglesias It’s linked in Ezra’s article.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
9 months
@katiedimartin Of course, a tone of deep embarrassment. If I'd meant it as a gotcha it would have been in meme form:
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
7 months
@DaveJensenMath x is a variable. 2x+5 is an expression. 2x+5 = 9 is a logical proposition which is either true or valse depending on the value of that variable. You are asking to find the set of values for which that statement is true.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
1 year
@littmath Math is more like the social sciences because we have grants, but they’re not large enough to justify our existence to the deans.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
14 days
@mattyglesias Seems like a fertile ground for ads. Just run ads showing Trump being president in 2020.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@mattyglesias Using 8 as a cutoff is intentionally tricksy. If 6-12 were an option everyone would get it right.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@MenInBlazers This is Matt Miazga erasure!
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
1 month
@littmath Ok, here's a weird pattern. Let's say that there's a partial tie-breaker where Alice wins if the final score is 0 and the last flip is tails. Then it looks like Alice always wins *exactly* one more game. (Then Alice wins by tiebreaker more than once, so Bob wins original game.)
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@mattyglesias This is partly because MD and MA Republican voters are also well to the left of national Republicans voters, whereas CA Republican voters are *to the right* of national Republicans.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
1 year
@normative What I don't get is how anyone thinks you can make a principled distinction between "deamplification" and "normal" operating of a proprietary algorithm. There's no "state of nature" here, once you're doing an algorithmic feed it's editorial decisions all the way down.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
6 years
@Nicole_Cliffe Nick Hornby’s shift from quintessential “lad lit” author to adapting books with a female lead into wonderful screenplays strongly centered on her point of view (An Education, Wild, Brooklyn) is remarkable and surprising.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@mattyglesias “There's no tech charm school that teaches you how to do all that stuff.” But, this is exactly what elite colleges do! I didn’t know how to behave like a rich person as a poor kid, but then I went to finishing school with people like Matt and now I do.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 months
@Right_Inverse The point of the basis-free philosophy isn’t to not choose bases, it’s that it frees you to pick the *right* basis when the time comes to start calculating.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@mattyglesias A big part of this is that there wasn’t a true “hammer” and US levels never got down very low. There also hasn’t been a “dance” because we wait for levels to skyrocket rather than just increase a tiny bit.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
4 years
@kdrum If you say this only in terms of “fear” I think you’re only getting half of the story. The other half is that Evangelicals are *excited* about being under threat, because Jesus says that if you’re a true Christian you will be persecuted.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@mattyglesias Nevada at 4th is completely insane.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
1 month
@BlighttownNIMBY @littmath My first guess was wrong because I also looked at expected points. But if expected points are the same and Alice has more scenarios when she runs up the score, then Bob should win more often.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@normative On the vast majority of most topics. You’d be badly misinformed on which 2016 candidate was better on data-retention compliance.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@jimtankersley @joshboak After Bruce Springsteen, of course.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 months
@niemerg @metakuna @etiennefd Within a single 6-month timeframe?
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@littmath I think it's only possible with an audience that genuinely understands quantifiers. Just "For all x, there exists y" is very very difficult for most calc students. The other tough part is students struggle with absolute value and with inequalities, better to use intervals.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
4 years
@mattyglesias What data you're talking about? Hospitalizations in DC plateaued around April 20 (with the peak around April 28). So infections slowed down a lot around April 6 or so, with a peak around April 13 or so. That's consistent w/ April 1 shutdown plus in-home spread the first week.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
12 days
@Prolemasses From 2006-2022, there were people from Portland with colds buying the cold medicine that works but was banned in Oregon on account of all the meth in Oregon.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
1 month
@littmath Here's a variant: four people Alice, Bob, Catherine, and Doug, who score points for HH, HT, TH, and TT respectively. By symmetry (switching H/T or the direction of time) each of Bob and Catherine beat each of Alice and Doug. But what happens if they team up B+C vs. A+D?
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@littmath The way I like to teach this, which I think still most students don't get, is to rephrase the quantifiers as a 2 person game. "First the villain picks epsilon... Then you pick delta... Then the villain picks x within \delta of a (but not a). Now we compute f(x) and see who wins.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@normative The even weirder thing is she wasn't asking to not have a conservatorship at all, she was just asking to change the conservator from her father to her management company. (It looks like they're now co-conservators.)
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@CT_Bergstrom @derekekelly @UW I think the issue is more fundamental. It's not that they learned and forgot what an integral is, it's that they think of math as meaningless strings of symbols with rewrite rules for "simplifying." Anything that breaks this paradigm is very hard for most students.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@Lord_SAS @thegoalkeeper The top players will move to the top clubs in Europe, like how the men's team works. The top women's club teams in Europe pay their stars $500K/year or more.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@ArtfulDodger183 @mattyglesias McKinsey isn't even doing a lot of hiring at state flagships, they're very focused on a tiny number of schools.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
7 months
@joshgondelman Not to get all serious, but there's a reason for this: almond extract is the flavor of bitter almonds not sweet almonds.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@TheRoyalKingD3 @mattyglesias The pope isn’t doing this (and actually told the US Bishops to knock it off, they didn’t listen).
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@mattyglesias They murdered Malcolm X.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@AstorAaron 55% of people take less than 1 flight a year. Most of them are nervous about flying when they do fly. You see similar things with security theater, opposed by people who fly regularly, but supported by people who don't.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@A2Booch @usmntonly Next up, Pulisic to Juve and Dest to Dortmund.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@dabrote @mattyglesias But France was invading Russia. The moral principle here isn't that Russia winning wars is bad, it's that invading your neighbors is bad and that Europe doesn't do Napoleon-style wars anymore.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@White_Shadow81 @mattyglesias Whooping Cough is a good comparison. 5 shot sequence as a kid, boosters ever 10 years, but there’s been a lot of breakthroughs and it may get moved to every 5 years.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@johncarlosbaez Ooh, there's an "Island of Stability" theory for it too. The existence or not of the Island of Stability is one of my favorite science questions.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
IMU’s announcement is conspicuously silent about changes to the EOC. Changes there are necessary for the event to continue.
@littmath
Daniel Litt
2 years
@AlexKontorovich For Russian government involvement in the ICM see:
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@mattyglesias Isn’t it that someone has to fly them? So either you have Americans flying planes directly into a war zone and possibly engaging directly with Russia planes, or you have Ukrainian pilots flying a war mission out of Germany. You can’t just put them on a train.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 months
@Tyler_A_Harper I don't think the humanities are being defunded because they're not rigorous. Pure math (which along with Chemistry has the lowest grades) is getting treated the same way as humanities in most places, while much less rigorous trade majors are beloved.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@littmath When I went up for tenure they wanted the published versions of my papers, and for one of them I had to ask on Facebook for someone to send it to me.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
8 months
@littmath @lastpositivist But it overlooks the key anti-woke nature of the text, were Homer alive today he would have written “Tell me, oh muse, of a based and red-pilled gigachad.” In this essay I will…
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
9 months
@etotheipie @katiedimartin It’s not even that, the war itself just gets skipped. Main focus is on the run-up and the debate over which side to take (Adams vs Jefferson), and then it just jumps to Andrew Jackson winning a battle after the war ends launching his political career.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
6 years
@electrolemon @rhymeswithmaria Halfway through the movie I whispered “I don’t remember her boyfriends’ names, I just call them Dean and Jess.”
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
1 month
I know IUT was over as mathematics years ago, but it’s kinda sad that it’s over now as memes too. No one’s even bothering to blog about the drama anymore
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
4 years
@JSEllenberg He's working in a non-commutative ring!
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
1 month
@micah_erfan @homoeconomix Not payroll, that's only on the first $170k, so doesn't apply to billionaires.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
4 months
@JujubeTing @mattyglesias I think that's the joke, but there's plenty of conservative presidents of major public universities. Presidents are usually chosen by boards appointed by the governor.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
4 years
@mattyglesias I’m from York, and I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about the density of the core cities here. York and Lancaster are mostly 2 and 3 story rowhouses and semidetached. York is 45K people in 4.5 square miles, which is high density.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@complainerstore Yeah, math is just different. It was revelatory to realize that if I wanted to learn the answer to a scientific question I could often just read it in a research paper. A paper in paleontology is easier for me to understand than a math paper not exactly in my area of expertise.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@mattyglesias The big factor here is language. That English is the language of research so all academics can move to the US, but most Americans are mono-lingual and don’t want to move to non-Anglophone countries. I think the US/UK flow goes the other way.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@mattyglesias DTaP is 4 doses before 18 months, a fifth dose at age 5, and then boosters every 10 years for the rest of your life. But it turns out Whooping Cough immunity wanes too quickly and boosters need to be more frequent.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
4 years
@littmath That's what PRIMS is for, not Inventiones.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
4 years
@mairesmith @molleguillaume The genetics tells you where the two groups were from who had contact, but it doesn't tell you whose boat was used for the journey. The archaeology tells you that a round trip voyage from Polynesia is much more likely.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@algeom @lpachter @AlexKontorovich Where "someone on the list once said something they don't like" = leadership is made up of the most outspoken opponents of diversity efforts in the profession? I'm not going to email strangers about it, but I don't see how you can be genuinely confused about their goals.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@mattyglesias Just that 17% of California would be the 17th largest state, very close to the population of Indiana.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@_SalmanAnwar Obviously British people don't want to believe this one because it used to be very false, but the US has had better beer for at least the past 20 years.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@jdanton @Nate_Cohn SD has a high percentage of Native Americans, and vaccinations through IHS have been a huge success. This effect becomes less visible with time, but see also Alaska and New Mexico.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
4 years
@mattyglesias York and Lancaster are both 8.2K/Mi^2. Reading is 9K/Mi^2. Harrisburg is a younger city and is 6K/Mi^2. That puts York and Lancaster denser than Minneapolis, Oakland, and Baltimore.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
1 month
Look at all games with n flips and take the difference of Alice and Bob’s scores. Now compare the sum of the pth powers of Alice’s win margins to Bob’s win margins. They tie if p=1, and we know Bob wins if p=0. Does Alice win for all p>1 and Bob for all 0<p<1?
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
11 days
@littmath Ooh, I want to read that! I ran across Madhava's work on power series a couple years ago when I was reading up on the history of approximations of pi for a worksheet for honors Calc 2. (I do somewhat question the framing of 14th-16th century Kerala as "indigenous" though.)
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@emilyriehl I take a third option, Noether in the theorem, but also talk about the history of abstract algebra. The whole notion of "abstract algebra" (by which I don't mean group theory or ring theory, but rather the abstract approach) is largely Noether's. One theorem sells her short.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@littmath You joke, but there is the Lean 3 to Lean 4 transition happening…
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
1 year
@jbeardsleymath I think this is very bad advice. It's setting them up for a hard failure when, as is very likely, they get a non-academic job (that they apparently couldn't imagine having) after their PhD. Also it discourages people who don't fit one specific over-confident personality type.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
1 year
New preprint! It's a follow-up to my last preprint with Nate Harman and Andrew Snowden (see this thread ). We study another new tensor category coming from an oligomorphic group. Here it's attached to the circle rather than the line.
@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
1 year
New paper! With Nate Harman and Andrew Snowden. A symmetric tensor categories is something that "looks like" the category of representations of a group. You have some "representations" and maps between them, with a notion of tensor product and dual reps.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@futuredci @normative Yes, you could teach a class like this, but do you really think 8th grade is the appropriate age for it?
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
1 year
@mixedlinguist @katiedimartin @nytimes “Low income” is the surprise to me here.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@reserved_word @mattyglesias Right. If you go to Dalton (or Stuy, or TJ, or Exeter) you just need to be in the top n. If you go somewhere that’s not a school that is regularly putting multiple students into Harvard, then you need something special in your CV that only describes dozens not thousands.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@littmath It does such a great job of explaining why there are exactly six planets!
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@littmath A clean theorem here is that if they're isomorphic *as algebra objects*, then they differ by tensoring with an invertible. (There's nice generalizations of this statement to algebra objects in fusion categories.)
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
8 months
@littmath I think it’s supposed to be Lie’s Theorem, but without the solvable hypothesis stated.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@EmiDoesMath @emilyriehl My first several years I essentially did this. Not out of planning, but because the notes were on individual sheets of paper half of which would end up crumpled in the bottom of my bag. Then I made a plan and now I use moleskines instead!
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
5 months
@CougarSpider Enough Germans went on summer vacation to the Yukon that Condor had a direct Frankfurt to Whitehorse flight for decades.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
4 years
@mattyglesias Surely Palin/Biden wins on that front, Palin's the only VP candidate who managed to be unpopular enough to impact votes.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
22 days
@CleominaChess I’m not against the eval bar, but I wish we could get a better eval bar that made more clear the difference between a clear lead and a position that’s difficult for everyone.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
1 year
@littmath I learned about exact sequences when I was 17 and Jared Weinstein was reading some graduate level number theory book and it just mentioned exact sequences assuming you already knew them. Jared worked out the meaning from context and set it as a puzzle for me.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
3 years
@KatieBeaman @mattyglesias No, because there’s basically nothing before 5 weeks. It’s just that 6 and 7 weeks are much more common than 8-12. The trick here is just using 8 as a cutoff. What’s more accurate is that a huge portion are 5-10.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@littmath One of the worst things we’re taught as kids is that you find errors by carefully going over each step again. If you want to check something you have to figure out a way to test it that isn’t just repeating the argument in the same setting.
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@NoahJSnyder
Noah Snyder
2 years
@littmath Imagine thinking a hipster algebraic geometer would read a book written in English…
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