Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 7hRetweeting my friend's cat for anyone who followed me in the last two days for cat pix. 020
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Guys I’ve been holding out on you — we got kittens like a month ago and I haven’t posted any pictures. 1842751128
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 29/09/2026John Baez @johncarlosbaez.bsky.social I'm sitting in on the first day of a topics course by my colleague Ian Zemke and he's currently praising your book Gauge Fields, Knots, and Gravity, so if your ears are burning that's why. 140
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 29/09/2026Drove in past the train yard along Northwest Expressway, and in the distance were the south hills and Spencer’s Butte with the morning light on them, and it was nice. 140
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 28/09/2026Found a note from my past self in the TeX comments for one of my syllabi: "Next time put these due dates back on Fridays -- this year Veterans' Day and the final exam schedule got in the way." Thanks dogg, you really had me scratching my head about why those things were all due on Thursdays. 160
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 22/09/2026Joke at lunch was that maybe Trump will unilaterally rename the journal and then Google will think I have a paper in JAMS. 160
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 22/09/2026Someone dropped this cable on the sidewalk. I thought about picking it up, but my car only has one cigarette lighter, and even if it had two I can’t think of a situation where I’d need to connect them. 120
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 21/09/2026Just spent half an hour thinking I’d found a mistake in a paper of Voisin, and once again the mistake was mine. 040
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 21/09/2026After a long wait, my paper with Elden Elmanto has been accepted at J. Eur. Math. Soc. Best journal I’ve gotten into in a while. arxiv.org/abs/2312.06930arxiv.orgThe Lichtenbaum-Quillen dimension of complex varietiesThe Lichtenbaum-Quillen conjecture for smooth complex varieties states that algebraic and topological K-theory with finite coefficients become isomorphic in high degrees. We define the "Lichtenbaum-Qu... 5212
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 19/09/2026Wondered about the etymology of “feisty” so I looked it up. Worth reading all the way to the end… www.etymonline.com/word/feistyetymonline.comFeisty - Etymology, Origin & Meaning"aggressive, exuberant, touchy," American English, with -y (2) + feist "small dog,"… See origin and meaning of feisty. 220
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Today’s the day! Our college administration is taking over the math department office, kicking out our department head and academic staff to make room for “operations” staff. We fought it longer than other departments, but in the end we lost. 340
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 15/09/2026I thought I was ready to resubmit the paper to the journal, and then I thought maybe I should ask Claude to check for typos. Humbling. 130
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 14/09/2026Essay by Burt Totaro on the Hodge conjecture, posted last Friday. terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/o...terrytao.wordpress.comOn the Hodge conjecture[This is a guest post by Burt Totaro. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] These are strange times for mathematicians. It now seems po… 140
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 12/09/2026Does anyone write Birch\Swinnerton/Dyer to troll the automorphic forms people. 021
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 12/09/2026Pretty pleased with the green bean situation this fall. Here’s this evening’s harvest. 370
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 30/08/2026My neighbor moved away and gave me his battery-powered lawn mower. So much better than my old plug-in electric mower — why did I spend a decade wrestling that extension cord around the yard instead of just buying something that worked? 141
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 30/08/2026Ok I said I’d quit Google Maps over the Gulf of America, but this time I really am done. 450
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 28/08/2026Picture isn’t coming out but there’s a pretty good lunar eclipse right now. 040
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 08/08/2026Remember how years ago, Google was criticized for having Wikipedia as the top result when you searched for a medical topic, just like it was for any other topic, so they changed their algorithm to have medical searches return WebMD, Mayo Clinic, etc. first and Wikipedia much lower if at all? … 131
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 06/08/2026This is a bigger result, of the form “asked ChatGPT, got a wrong answer, but thinking about it led to a right answer.” And the conjecture was much-discussed but not widely believed. 060
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 05/08/2026Ben Antieau and his FRG collaborators have proved that Hodge numbers are invariants of the derived category of a smooth complex projective 4-fold, with a new idea from the fancy version of ChatGPT. 150
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 31/07/2026Just learned that the root of “onerous” is “onus,” a burden. To exonerate someone was originally to unburden them. 130
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 19/07/2026The Odyssey is good. The running discussion of the Sea Peoples is a clever addition. 120
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 19/07/2026The blackberries in the field down the street are ripening so we made our first pie of the season. Out of practice, but not a bad start. 380
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 06/07/2026Came home from a long trip to find that my sunflowers have boomed and my passion flowers have gone to town. 280
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 01/07/2026This is the craziest escalator I’ve ever seen. 151
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 29/06/2026For anyone who knows the macaroni and cheese pizza from Ian’s Pizza in Madison, Wisconsin, this is basically the same except a sandwich from a 7-Eleven in Japan. 251
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 20/06/2026Overnight flight. R: “Sleep ok?” N: “Like the princess and the pea.” R: “Which one were you?” 040
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 17/06/2026Obvious in hindsight, but the auto wrecking place won’t let you out on the yard in sandals. 020
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 17/06/2026Help us out with a word game: water wings, firearms, air horns, earth… 400
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 15/06/2026Hearing reports that kids these days sign yearbooks with “HAGS” as short-hand for “have a good summer.” 030
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 14/06/2026Hope everyone’s been enjoying the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter for the last week or two. 130
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 12/06/2026Set my phone on top of the car, forgot about it, drove a few blocks to the grocery store, shopped, realized it was missing, found it still there on top of the car. I’m sure I’ve used up all my luck. 241
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 10/06/2026@littlejohn.bsky.social @bagofmoons.bsky.social you guys were talking about letting plants grow and seeing what they turn out to be… this wild brassica came up in our potato patch a month ago, and I don’t think I’m going to eat any part of it but it sure looks cool. 340
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 09/06/2026Once again found myself writing “by a similar argument…” and then thinking maybe I’d better write out the details just in case, and it turned out to be much more complicated. 2141
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 08/06/2026If they ever rope me into being department chair, my signature policy will be “no taco bars at work functions.” 230
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 03/06/2026Been slacking with my little league posts, sorry. Alice’s team won their last game of the season tonight. She hit a grounder to the first baseman, which pulled him far enough off the bag that she managed to beat him there. 040
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 31/05/2026Just learned that palm trees are so called because the leaves look a bit like fingers spreading out from the palm of the hand. This is in Latin (palma), and then both meanings were borrowed into English via Old French much later. 010
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 25/05/2026Well they’ve finally reopened the Chambers St. viaduct after probably two years of construction. They closed half the lanes, tore up one side of the road, and then did nothing for a year because they neglected to get permission from the railroad before starting work. 110
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 23/05/2026At the Eugene Emeralds game, sitting in the table area way out on the right field line hoping to catch foul balls, and we haven’t had one come to us yet but the fielder did toss one to Alice. 040
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 20/05/2026Bird bath next to my office getting some use. 130
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 19/05/2026Good earth-shine on the crescent moon as I was taking out the trash. 050
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 16/05/2026My colleague turned me on to this site where you can generate all kinds of crazy graph paper. I needed some triangular graph paper to work out a combinatorial thing. incompetech.com/graphpaper/incompetech.comGraph Paper GeneratorsCustom graph paper generators and royalty-free music. 4101
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 06/05/2026MathSky: can anyone recommend an undergraduate abstract algebra textbook that does rings before groups? 793
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 06/05/2026Autocorrect turned “quartic K3 surface” into “aquatic K3 surface” and now I want to study them. 2111
Nicolas Addington @naddington.bsky.social · 23/04/2026Thinking back on being assigned to read Animal Farm in 7th grade (1994). We knew next to nothing about the Soviet Union, certainly no idea who Stalin was, and as far as I remember the teacher didn’t try to explain the allegory. What were we supposed to take from it? A cautionary tale about cliques? 220
