Marcello Seri

Hey, season 3 of It's Not Just Numbers is back! Tune in for the first two episodes of the year. Last in the row, an episode on study associations creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/... #mathSky

Save the date! Thursday 5 November, 16.00-18.00, @sciencefaction.nl borrel at Vin Natuur. We will have an occasion to discuss what has happened, is happening and will happen in the university council and explore who wants to join our lists for the next council elections

Awesome nerdy livestream alert! In not even ✨one hours time✨ there will be An Evening of Unnecessary Detail at the RI and there's a pay what you can livestream :) I know its gonna be amazing cos it features my bestie @sophiemacmaths.bsky.social 💗 www.rigb.org/whats-on/eve...

feeling really burned out, so I redrew the computer in the top and bottom to be a bit haunted 😌

A new study tests one of the classics: learning styles. With 194 students, matching instruction to supposed learning styles did not improve learning. Audiovisual instruction did help, regardless of “learning style”. wp.me/p2nWPo-6h2

In our course and book _Calling Bullshit_, we posit that If something seems too good, or too bad, to be true, it probably is. Now as a college professor I'm pretty confident that overreliance can AI can harm our thinking ability, but just ten minutes of use? Let's dig into this this study a bit.

This tracks with my experience peer reviewing heavily AI-generated papers—just crazy that it’s happening at this scale, with claims of disrupting an entire field. I feel bad for the mathematicians who have to sort through all this. They should get paid.

I think the cubic shape is the *unintentional consequence* of their very long digestive process (14+ days), required to process tough roots & grasses, extracting all moisture. The cubes are just a fortunate happenstance of super-efficient distal colons. Article here:

508 tiles! Just shy of our current record. We’ll try again next year! #ZpannendZernike

All this, 😒:

Meta's "Muse" launched with a nasty zero day flaw that gave hackers the ability to spy on Mac users, openly gives root access to people pretending to be Muse agents, and invited strangers over to another guy's house without telling him

🔭 Andromeda before Photoshop Image Credit: Kees Scherer ap260927

✨ Searching for the first generation of stars Else Starkenburg, astronomer @rug.nl @kapteynastro.bsky.social is searching for early-generation stars in nearby galaxies with the international programmes WEAVE and 4MOST to see what they are made of Read more 👇 🔗 www.rug.nl/fse/news/mat... 🧪 #SciComm

That's a nice paper you got there. It'd be a shame if anything .... happened to it

Wow does the post title bury the lede! I particularly like the pictured comment.

Mr. Unthank, who lives in Italy, also programmed a fly to use a car’s blinkers when turning because he was frustrated that so few human drivers seem to use them. “That’s how easy it is,” he said. “Even a fly could do it.” 😳😳😳

It's not only Harvard. Universities worldwide have made conracts with AI companies, paying to get more tokens and/or tokens for more advanced LLMs. And yet, some people have "their" research stopped because they run out of tokens. All of this in the current times of scarce and dwindling funding.

I criminali informatici non hanno violato direttamente i sistemi di Revolut: secondo informazioni date da loro stessi, si sarebbero serviti di almeno un indirizzo ufficiale di posta certificata delle forze dell’ordine italiane, violato in precedenza ilpost.link/tzasnLnTbc

EXCLUSIVE: Humans are reading ChatGPT users’ prompts to improve OpenAI’s models, and those chats can include sensitive, personal information, according to leaked internal documents and real prompts seen by 404 Media.

RE: https://hcommons.social/@mpe/117254767841427566 quite the achievement to get every living Fields medalist together to denounce something to which a handful of them have been actively contributing

Here's your list of prompts for creating #MathArt throughout October. Happy #MathOber and looking forward to some beautiful #Art.

If you're wondering what has been going on in this domain, please do read this.

Here is Holman and Bruner's wonderful paper on why this is so dangerous, and how the same strategy in the past earned a lot of money for pharmaceuticals at the cost of an estimated 100k lives

By taking this money, social scientists allow Anthropic rather than the scientific community to decide what the agenda will be in AI research.

This surface visualizer is super cool: e-infinity.space/picture-book/ Ping @msmathcomp.bsky.social

Just a self-reminder for when the shady unethical behavior of large corporations seeking marketing stunts shadows my affection for mathematics: go on and read Francis Su "The Enduring Value of Math, in an Age of AI" francissu.substack.com/p/the-enduri...

Dancing very very VERY close to saying “OpenAI stole our almost-complete proof of Navier-Stokes from internal access to our ChatGPT sessions because they were desperate to scoop Anthropic” which is absolutely 100% a believable thing OpenAI would do right now cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/st...

I sometimes send people this page: www.astrokatie.com/solicited-ad... which I hope is helpful. (See first paragraph for why I don’t provide individual mentorship to strangers.)

This is very interesting - a blog by a mathematician who was working on a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem on finding out that Anthropic has done it in 11 days. It is interesting because it does not concede the field, but says what it does / doesn't do xenaproject.wordpress.com/2026/09/04/f...

Todays substack on AI for paper writing - does it work? (spoiler: no, and you probably don't want it to either) open.substack.com/pub/redpenbl...

Tag yourself with your current location!

Soooo.... did y'all get that this is calendar Tetris... or .... no?

In case you'd like to try reading more than marketing claims and press coverage, this review article covers what makes it feel like LLMs do more than stringing together tokens: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Includes recent research showing the brittleness of 'reasoning' that experts here refer to

23 light hours, 47 light minutes, 20 light seconds and counting. Getting real close to a full twenty four hours for the one-way light time.

Fixing the issue? Heavens no. But we’ll let you report it when it happens. Good luck out there

They actually say modulus, but journalists dumb it down. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/imagin... PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

You can use this UN-approved Equal Earth projection right now in #rstats #gis #databs

Looking for mathematical opportunities? 🔎 The EMS website lists job vacancies and upcoming conferences, workshops, schools and other events from across the mathematical community. 💼 Jobs: euromathsoc.org/jobs 📅 Events: euromathsoc.org/events

Pura potenza. La spettacolare immagine che vedete mostra la contemporanea presenza di tre tempeste tropicali sul Pacifico centrale e orientale; due sono uragani maggiori (Lowell e Karina), la terza (Marie) diventerà un uragano nelle prossime ore. 1/5

First EIA, then Energy Institute, and now @ourworldindata.org have abandoned the "substitution method" of defining primary energy and instead adopted Chris Wright's preferred method, making the impact of hydro+PV+wind look 2.5x smaller than it actually is. 😡 🔌💡 ourworldindata.org/primary-ener...

Reaction Diffusion in Photoshop- Blur, Sharpen, Posterize, repeat

noblogs.org maintainers Collettivo Autistici / Inventati, have been declared terrorist organisation by the U.S. cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/10076

I've been saying for some time that we should use AI systems to produce better work, as opposed to, say, more PDFs. One simple thing we can now do is identify and fix lots of extant errors in the literature. 1/17

Once again: university courses HAVE to change if we want our students to keep learning things. AI hinders education. Learning always requires effort, and effort-shortcuts always impede learning

👀 Alt-text: Graph of average exam score for Chinese secondary students vs homework score where students using AI for homework show an anticorrelation at above average homework scores whereas exam scores for students who never used AI are correlated with exam score. 🍎 #AcademicSky

NWO kiest 'praktisch' voor Microsoft als ruggengraat van zijn digitale infrastructuur, mede door SURF-licenties. Straks stromen daar de "kroonjuwelen" doorheen: subsidies, financiën, relatiebeheer. Open source is voor de kern uitgesloten, juist nu SURF en universiteiten van Big Tech af willen.

A beautiful reflection on what math is about, and how human understanding is formed, even the an age of AI. I plan to assign it as reading in my advanced analysis course this Fall. From my colleague Jon Jacobsen in the Mathematical Intelligencer: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

A conference in honor of Jean-Pierre Serre on the occasion of his 100th birthday will be held in Paris on September 15 and 16, 2026. Speakers: Pierre Deligne, Ramon van Handel, Peter Sarnak, Maryna Viazovska, Don Zagier and possibly Jean-Pierre Serre. www.reddit.com/r/math/comme...