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Michael Barany

@mjb.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy

you may know me from birdsite as mbarany or (no relation) mathhistfacts moving my mathsiest posting from there to here 🌉 bridged from ⁂ mathstodon.xyz/@mjb, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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Michael Barany @mjb.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 14/07/2025

Edinburgh-area and Fringe-bound followers, come see me tell a very old fart joke and talk about the history of maths! 2nd and 21st August

Solving the unsolvable
A Medieval conundrum and the pungent nature of mathematics.

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Michael Barany @mjb.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 03/03/2025

it is my sincerest, kindest, most optimistic hope for the future of mathematics that chatbots are never normalised as a perceived adjunct to understanding

Terence Tao says: Yesterday I attended a lecture on a topic outside of my own area of expertise - the Langlands program and the cohomology of Shimura varieties - and found that it was actually quite helpful to discreetly ask some questions to a large language model during the lecture to help keep up. (A log of my questions can be found here at https://chatgpt.com/share/67c0be9e-17cc-800e-a222-c4328287d619 .) There is still some cultural resistance to having audience members access their computers and other devices during a lecture, but I think there is some non-trivial value in permitting this sort of augmentation of the lecture so long as it is not disruptive or distracting, and I wonder if etiquette norms about this sort of assistance will evolve over time.

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