My favorite example of girl math is when David Hilbert and Albert Einstein couldn't solve how energy conservation worked in general relativity, so Hilbert asked Emmy Noether about it and she solved it for them.
My favorite example of girl math is when David Hilbert and Albert Einstein couldn't solve how energy conservation worked in general relativity, so Hilbert asked Emmy Noether about it and she solved it for them.
It's so funny to me that people think of Math/Mathematicians as being hyper-logical and rational. Like, have you seen some of the wild things hiding in the Math?
Did you know there are non-computable numbers?? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant)
Did you know that there are things that are true, but we can't prove them??? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems)
Did you know that we can prove that something exists, and yet never actually figure out what that thing is?? (https://mathworld.wolfram.com/NonconstructiveProof.html)
Math is crazy. Math is wild. Math hardly makes sense, and when you think you understand the weirdest parts of it, everyone who hears you explain it to thinks you're a gibbering lunatic.
"In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them." - von Neumann
(please share more unhinged math with me, i want to see more scary math)
let pi=9
one of the biggest things I can advocate for (in academia, but also just in life) is to build credibility with yourself. It’s easy to fall into the habit of thinking of yourself as someone who does things last minute or who struggles to start tasks. people will tell you that you just need to build different habits, but I know for me at least the idea of ‘habit’ is sort of abstract and dehumanizing. Credibility is more like ‘I’ve done this before, so I know I can do it, and more importantly I trust myself to do it’. you set an assignment goal for the day and you meet it, and then you feel stronger setting one the next day. You establish a relationship with yourself that’s built on confidence and trust. That in turn starts to erode the barrier of insecurity and perfectionism and makes it easier to start and finish tasks. reframing the narrative as a process of building credibility makes it easier to celebrate each step and recognize how strong your relationship with yourself can become
girl math this. girl math that. put some RESPECT on their names
(pictured: Emmy Noether; Sof'ja Vasil'evna Kovalevskaja; Katherine Johnson; Maryam Mirzakhani)
Michael Collins
Problem: Maths (& Physics) have too many cases where a symbol is used, confusingly, to mean multiple different things, leading to ambiguity and headaches. Sensible solution: Use a key or just simply clarify the meaning in context, so v here is velocity, or v here is an arbitrary vector, or v here is specifically final velocity, or v here is the harmonic function for the complex part of a complex function f(z) for the purposes of the Cauchy-Riemann & Laplacian equations, or v here is the potential V(x) differentiated with respect to time (yes i have seen this once, it was disgusting). My solution: add new characters. invent new scripts. steal syllabaries, acquire abjads, and abduct alphabets until we have enough squiggly lines to give literally everything its own unique symbol. This will help nobody and ruin everything. I will not rest until I am doing theoretical physics with these bad boys:
[Image ID: The 120 base Sitelen Pona of Toki Pona. They are simple, black and white, cartoonish, almost child-like drawings that act as logographic characters for the base words of the conlang Toki Pona. Each one has its corresponding name/word in Latin script beneath. End ID] Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.