iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

...to all the girls who dream of winning a nobel prize!

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Wake me up when nobel prize week is over.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

A particularly egregious case of a nobel prize that was stolen from a woman.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

A pair of enantiomorphs is isometric, as well as being non-superposable mirror images, so we need coordinates to distinguish them. I feel this is an area in which human, non-AI, mathematics could help make real advances in understanding the occurrence, distribution and fate of life in the universe.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Part of the difficulty is that, to this day, mathematics has not come to terms with chiral asymmetry, although it is well-known empirically to physicists since 1904, and to chemists since the 1850s. Its effects in pharmacology were only realized after the thalidomide tragedies of the 1950s.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

This is just an amusing teaser to get you thinking, because the problem of biological achirality has not been seriously considered when asking questions about life elsewhere in the universe.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Chien-Shiung Wu, violation of conservation of parity.

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Reposted by Rowena Ball

Kourosh Kalantar-Zadeh @kouroshkalantar.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Sydney Opera House after a heavy downpour

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Just on that teleological vision Star Trek had for humans. All the teleologists you meet in Hell must feel like they been scammed.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Because the aliens are of opposite chirality. They are made of L-ribonucleotides and D-amino acids. If the aliens came here the pub bistro menus would have to include OC options (as well as the usual GF and V), or they would starve. The OC foods would have to be made in a lab – hideously expensive.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

They might be a bit friendly. Could be a clumsy way of saying 'Put stuff in the Supplementary Material'. That is totally under your control, quarantined from rogue reviewers, and if you mention SM in the main article abstract and intro readers reach for it first but have to cite the main article.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

1. Explosive new drama! That's chemistry for you. 2. They might be, if you're not watching. So you'll never know. 3. That's an explosive allegation.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Understatement of the week: Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds describe receiving limited understanding from family and friends.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Thanks. Noted. Holds other senior positions in France and Germany. They are *always* serial predators and have multiple bases. And some institutes, perhaps a hemisphere away, rely heavily on attracting long-term visiting appointees.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

You would have to get IT to turn off the WiFi in the seminar room! Even then, students would still use their phone data allowance to promptify AI maths answers and make AI summaries in real time. I know a pleasant clearing deep in Namadgi, though, which has a campfire but no signal reception!

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Figure mowing long grass. "Snake tongue" "Snake". If that don't convince me to call The Green Smith this very minute, nothing will. Smart business graphics! QR codes never work. Thoughtful annotation to save you trouble.

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Reposted by Rowena Ball

Nalini Joshi @monsoon0.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I will be giving the 2026 Moyal Medal Lecture today at 18:30 at the Macquarie University campus 👉🏼 www.mq.edu.au/faculty-of-s...

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Ruins the view and ambience of existing trestle viaduct across the Maribyrnong.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Telligent is the word. Some humans seem to have a type of rat-cunning, self-serving, self-aggrandizing, belligerent, power-greedy telligence that increases and becomes more vicious with age. Slime moulds seem rather cool and smart!

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

There, there. It just means 'Tears of sorrow flow. Mythesis.doc not found.'

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

There are 3 left-spiral (sinistral) snails and 6 right-spiral (dextral) snails. Sinistral snails are rare and were called Kings. The setting is a Christian basilica, so... Chiral codes were used in Australian Indigenous societies too, centuries before chirality was 'discovered' by Western science.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Or you could just get the kids to make your flyer

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Wait til the bots and bros start using the royal plural. We will not be amused. We mean, of course, we will laugh them off-stage.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I'm all in favour of interdisciplinary provided it doesn't come out of my budget. Thus spake Head of School.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Aha, an old bookshop. Abandon time all ye who enter. "Chamber's Seven-Figure Mathematical Tables, 1878". Amazing. They would have been computed by assistants, probably women. Oh well, at least I have rescued one book from the AI shredder!

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Through the misty arches... across the 150th meridian east... what lies beyond?

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

That book has been well-thumbed by generations of students and mathematical practitioners, and has travelled across oceans and continents and within cities. One day a grad student in forensic science could take DNA swabs from the pages and do some book archaeology! Reason enough to rescue it.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Haha I know a heritage engineer who won't give up til he gets his hands on one

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Makes you wonder what's in the basement, a cable tram winding engine or what

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Oh, bots and agents can 'referee' their Claude prompts and AI whatnots. I'm here for human researchers.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Thanks, good to know! Maybe Yarra Trams could buy the building back and re-let it to ethical community tenancies.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I wondered if that was just a preserved facade, there seem to be quite a few of those. Yesterday I tried unsuccessfully to find the 'Collins Street, 5pm' building in the 1955 painting by Brack at the NGV. Ironically the faded sign in the painting is 'Bank of New South Wales'.

Collins St., 5 pm, a 1955 painting by Australian artist John Brack at the NGV. My photo

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

No because you sustain an influential cascade as that preference inspires the 10 teachers and lab assistants who communicate that enthusiasm to the students who, in a few years, will willingly pay it forward too. First year teachers should get a bonus they are so influential!

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Oh did they put some pot-plants in Glasgow Central station subway

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Well NZ has got a North Island and a South Island, and the Kiwis call Australia the West Island. Very generous people, the New Zealanders, with a fine mathematical tradition. They are invited.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

A jolly decent group. Pity they'll be swallowed up before they get to visit the Global Institute for Human and Heritage Mathematics (at Bundaberg).

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Reminds me of a prescient line from the Goon Show of the 1960s: "You silly twisted fools" (AI to the gang of 9).

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Haha! Meanwhile, China smiles enigmatically... I just said that because it seems that mathematicians in the rest of the world, who are given no say yet who stand to lose the most, are excluded – but mention of the dreich word "China" usually provokes western cultural gatekeepers!

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

What are they talking about, Bob Katter has lurked there for about 100 years

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Dense, in the sense of being unable to see the bleeding obvious or join the dots (fenceposts), refers to fog. Try "Denser than a winter morning fog in Canberra". A violent merger of neutron stars 5 billion years ago created heavy elements that cause troubles in human affairs, such as gold.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

and Australia, then European from Dutch colonisation. Today all mathematics research fields are represented in Indonesian universities. Their mathematicians were looking forward to greater government research funding, but now...They have not forgotten they owe it to China and India tho, not the west

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Last month we sponsored a maths visitor from Indonesia, an extraordinarily diverse nation of 270 million. She gave a talk on her own field and another talk on the history of Indonesian mathematics. It developed indigenously and was shaped by influences from India, China, Persia and the Islamic world

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Without bringing global mathematics along it will likely reinforce western-white-guy hero worship and glorification of a cult. #UnintendedConsequences

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Wow! Very secret it is from usual flight paths.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Well the pilot should announce it. Like when your flight passes near Uluru.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

the gift of being able to see herself as others saw her – for one day only. That day seven *horrid* little girls followed her around, they stole mathematics from each other – I mean toys – they were sly and greedy and selfish and loud and disrespectful. Oh, never mind. Just a silly morality tale.

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I hesitate to say to US-western mathematics, "Will ye take a good, hard look at yourselfs!" lest it provide encouragement for further frenzies of navel-gazing. When I was 7, I read a children's book in the public library, over and over, about a little girl whose fairy godmother gave her

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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Fine, good, although...this Association for Human Mathematics seems overly European-British-US-centric. 'The mathematical community' – to whom and what cultural mathematics does that refer? Oh well, never mind. I guess the AHM be a response to a threat by AI specifically to some Western mathematics

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