iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Simon Burton

Count Binface @countbinface.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Any Clacton residents who want to nominate your friendly neighbourhood intergalactic space warrior, ping me a line!

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

The great thing about standardized naming schemes is there's so many to choose from, or you can make your own!

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

New paper today with Hussain Anwar: we started out trying to understand why magic state distillation works, and ended up re-inventing quantum physics.. and of course the mathematicians already did this stuff 150 years ago scirate.com/arxiv/2605.0...

pre-image of Klein's octahedral function

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Algebra without letters: so quiet you can hear the wind in the leaves. From arxiv.org/abs/2605.03102

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

What does the Sierpiński triangle have to do with Pascal's triangle? Here's a pictorial answer; i'm just learning about this from Bowman's "Diagrammatic Algebra" book

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

A string diagram for an element of the hyperoctahedral group has a symmetry property, from Bowmans book "Diagrammatic Algebra". This immediately suggests a braided version ... hmm..

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Wherein philosophy is dragged, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

I think I am just about ready to make my own search engine.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

Ruth Kastner has some things to say about field theories..

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

It must be so frustrating to have billions of dollars and still be a miserable a**hole.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

The principle of "two big ideas": one contains the other, or else they are not big ideas.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

If people are going to continue to put the introduction to their paper in the abstract, then i'm going to put my paper's abstract in the title.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Any sufficiently complicated physics paper contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of an idea from algebraic geometry.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

Today's OEIS fishing expedition. The only question is how much RAM am i going to need to find the next number... Love these OEIS cliff-hangers! ARGGH

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

Behold! A one-qubit quantum computer:

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

no don't kill it. Yes we need it.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

Wowee, this new collection threads the needle nicely between philosophy and physics. Authors actually explaining their ideas instead of just academicsplaining. link.springer.com/collections/...

link.springer.com

Perspectivism and Quantum Mechanics

In recent years, perspectivism has emerged as a leading contender in the scientific realism debate. Highlighting that human access to reality is always ...

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Reposted by Simon Burton

Rochelle @uberwensch.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

What is entanglement? Itamar Pittowsky claimed that these results brought us right to the precipice of logical contradiction--but not over. Abner Shimoney described it as a piece of "experimental metaphysics." I'm a nobody, but I think entanglement is the most interesting thing ever discovered. 🧵⚛️

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

James Dolan has a knack for describing higher mathematics using vivid language... not much of this has made it into written form, but there are a lot of old posts of his on google groups

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

love these OEIS flamewars.. might have to wait a few more years to see if there's any followup.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 12/04/2025

new book alert... oh, these pictures look like fun

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

TIL: the geometric Langlands program is where love and perversion are united

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

My favourite book on group theory just arrived in the mail! I had it shipped over from the US secondhand using biblio.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

I love conference submission deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

we need more professional crackpots like this

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

Only a physicist would be so arrogant as to specify "the fifth root of unity". Here is one example:

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

I've been putting together a database of small quantum codes. If you'd like to contribute your parity check matrices, and any references, i'll add them qecdb.org/codes/ Thanks!

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

wup, the modular forms db now has finite groups !

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

Oh yeah, this guy gets it. Every subgroup of the cube reflection group. freethoughtblogs.com/atrivialknot...

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

I've been really enjoying this biography of Coxeter, from 2006, just recently republished.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

This is the miracle octad generator (MOG) of Conway and Curtis. It is a kind of treasure map for the S(5,8,24) Steiner system, 24 bit Golay code, the Mathieu group M_24, and much more... (1/?)

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

I'm glad we have Wall st to tell us if quantum computing is going to work or not.

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