iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Somebody was giving away used math books in the department today and I managed to snag this one. Looks interesting...

Printed version of the 1994 conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC)

TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I have really come a long way. Just look at the stuff I was posting 2 years ago. I had zero hope back then... (Excuse the fact that the screenshots are from the site that shall not be named. This was before I got Bluesky...)

screenshots of the following tweets:
https://x.com/t0tientqu0tient/status/1754254969849454971
https://x.com/t0tientqu0tient/status/1785713351042928693

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Grades for my first term at Waterloo just dropped. Kinda chic to disprove the haters and disbelievers who said that I could never do math based on my Tripos performance with my 99% term average 🙂

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Oops, forgot to post this yesterday... Anyways, managed to make it back to Cambridge 2 years after nearly flunking the Cambridge tripos! Just ignore the fact that it's Cambridge from Temu...

Sign saying
"Welcome to City Hall
City of Cambridge"

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Visited an interesting place today, will share more pics tonight

A plaque that says the following:
"A TIME CAPSULE
Lies buried here in Dalton Court to be opened July 15, 2083 by the City Council of the day.
Preserving some of our heritage for future generations.
Dedicated July 15, 1983."

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

No Gemini, I am not looking for an explanation in fr*nch, even though 4 out of the 5 words in my query consist of borrowed terminology

Google search's AI overview responding to my query "jeu de taquin young tableaux" in French

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

The undergrad project I'm co-supervising this term just ended. Beyond being proud of what my mentees have achieved, witnessing the full process of how the ideas developed and watching their research skills grow in real-time is something I'll forever cherish. 1/2

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Haven't posted here in a while... Anyways, here's some Canada geese

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Random blasphemous idea: every finite graph is chordal by the fundamental theorem of algebra if we allowed perfect elimination orderings to have complex-valued neighbor counts (whatever that means) and defined chordality through linear factorability of the chromatic polynomial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chordal_graph#Maximal_cliques_and_graph_coloring

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Funny how people complain that the new arXiv policy is too harsh. If anything, it's still way too lenient. Getting caught with AI slop should result in a permanent, publicly viewable (in the form of a hall of shame) ban and retroactive redaction of all previous arXiv submissions. #AcademicSky (1/4)

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Good to see arXiv addressing type 2 errors by going after AI slop, but type 1 errors need addressing too. Lots of legitimate papers get rejected for no reason.

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Good to see arXiv addressing type 2 errors by going after AI slop, but type 1 errors need addressing too. Lots of legitimate papers get rejected for no reason.

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

I did the meme! (well, the first part for now)

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

I did the meme! (well, the first part for now)

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

I will never shut up about the absurdity of the tripos grading system.

Crosspost of my tweet on twitter:
"No one talks about how insulting it is to have your career and mental health nuked just because some Orwellian grading system decided that your academic potential is worth fuck all."
which is a quote-tweet of the following tweet:
"No one talks about how humbling it is to lose all your academic potential because of your mental health."

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

Just realized the date of this post. These are my genuine thoughts - it wasn't meant to be April Fools. I might still hop on every now and then but I'll be a lot more active on the other site.

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Honestly I feel like quitting this platform. The math community just isn't really big here and it Increasingly feels like I'm just talking to the void. I'm still active on tw*tter, and I might give mastodon another try too

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

Saw this excellent thread on Twitter (x.com/skominers/st...) about the issues surrounding zero-sum grading and thought I should share my thoughts and experiences once again. #AcademicSky (1/10) 🧵

Part 1/4 of the thread by Scott Kominers:

Under Harvard's proposed new grading policy, the 10th-best undergraduate out of 10 in a graduate-level elective would be capped at an A‑minus.

For honors evaluation, they would be recorded as "0th percentile."

That's not a typo.

Harvard aims to curb grade inflation by capping A grades in each course at (20% of enrollment) + 4 and evaluating honors using average percentile rank.

I've studied grading through the lens of incentive design.

The verdict: Harvard's proposal fails the game theory exam.

As I explain in
@thecrimson
today:

Under a grade cap, what matters isn't simply how well you perform.

It's how well you perform relative to the students sitting next to you.

There's an old joke about two hikers who encounter a grizzly bear.

One starts putting on running shoes.

The other asks, "What are you doing? You can't outrun a bear!"...

Part 2/4 of the thread:

... The first replies, "I don't have to outrun the bear — I just have to outrun you."

Grade caps create exactly this incentive structure.

I've seen this firsthand at Harvard Business School, which uses a fixed curve in most courses.

In my "Making Markets" elective — historically filled with many of the strongest students at the School — there typically haven't been enough top grades to go around.

As a result, some students miss out on top honors not because they fell short, but because there were so many good students in the room. 🤦‍♂️

A grade cap systematically penalizes ambitious students for surrounding themselves with strong classmates.

Perverse incentives follow:

A student prepared for an advanced course may drop down preemptively — seeking a pond where they're a bigger fish.

This intensifies competition in the lower-level class and reduces enrollment in the advanced course — making A's there even more scarce and accelerating the unraveling.

Strong students rationally avoid one another.

Part 3/4 of the thread:

Evaluating based on average percentile rank compounds this distortion by magnifying small performance differences into large gaps.

As noted above, the 10th-strongest student in a 10-person class registers at the 0th percentile rank even in a super-advanced elective.

The proposal suggests that faculty concerned about these effects could opt into SAT/UNSAT grading — but those courses would be excluded from aggregate rankings. 🤔

That means a student could end up being evaluated primarily on introductory and general education courses, rather than advanced work in their field. 😅

All of this undermines the goal of producing meaningful signals of achievement.

GPA prizes risk becoming contests over who best avoided letter-graded classes with other top students.

And there's disproportionate harm to students who push the boundaries of their abilities.

Students who stretch themselves bear the most risk under a cap.

Part 4/4 of the thread:

In the limit, I worry this will make top students think twice about coming to Harvard. 😧

As @joshgans and I explain in a recent paper, the core underlying problem is an issue of statistical identification.

A grade compresses two dimensions into one:

1) student ability
2) course difficulty

Without information about course difficulty, it's impossible to know whether a high grade reflects high ability or simply an easier classroom.

Grade caps make this problem worse by removing the flexibility to give out higher grades on the margin in a more demanding environment.

As @joshgans and I show, there are better options.

We could report course difficulty, or use finer rating scales like 1-100.

Better yet, we could use statistical methods to account for course competitiveness — similar to the Elo system in chess.

But meanwhile, Harvard's current proposal pushes students to outrun one another rather than to outsmart bears.

We should not rush to give grade caps an A they don't deserve.

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

Now that I've finally sorted everything (visa, housing etc) it's time for the grand reveal. I will be starting my Master of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo! Henceforth commences my long-awaited academic redemption... #MathSky #AcademicSky

My offer letter with my personal information hidden, showing my successful admission with funding to the Combinatorics and Optimization MMath program at the University of Waterloo.

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

For those who don't know me and what I've been through, I cannot overstate my gratitude towards Waterloo. While other grad schools refused to look past my grades, Waterloo showed sympathy towards my struggles with the Cambridge Tripos and offered me a chance to prove my worth.

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Institution email activated ✅ Now I can finally use overleaf premium and access paywalled journals again!

You're using Overleaf Premium
You're on the Professional plan because of your affiliation with [redacted]

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Should I pay for Claude? I found the free version quite decent at doing literature reviews. Now that I'll be doing a lot more research soon, $20/month doesn't seem that bad of an investment if it's going to help a lot.

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

Hey babe, are you the type of conjugate-partition symmetry exhibited by Macdonald polynomials? Cuz damn, you're a (q,t)! #MathSky

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

CNY is such a fake and performative "festival", can't wait for it to be over. What's the point of giving out red packets if you don't even get to keep the cash lol

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

#MathSky #AcademicSky Oh well, bad news again. 2nd arXiv paper got a journal rejection too. This one hurts much more than my 1st rejection since it's a much better paper. Coauthor told me she's published worse papers in comparable journals. I'm worried that my paranoia is becoming justified. 1/4

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

New banger I've been reading lately #MathSky

"Handbook of the Tutte Polynomial and Related Topics"
by Joanna Ellis-Monaghan and Iain Moffatt
https://doi.org/10.1201/9780429161612

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

Just got a new laptop after 6 years. Look at this bad boy :D

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

New Year's Resolution: - Finish reviewing the journal manuscript assigned back in November - Read lots of papers in my proposed research area - Prepare for my master's courses - Begin my master's - Publish a paper or two - Finish 40% of my thesis - Hopefully don't get burned out

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

The thing I'm looking forward to the most as an incoming grad student is having institution access to journals once again.

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

I used to think that reputation takes years to build and seconds to destroy, but the current state of the world suggests the opposite for the latter. Lots of shameless people, institutions, brands etc that have clearly fallen off are somehow still milking its historical prestige.

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

Alright, formal offer letter received, visa application submitted, thesis topic decided. Looks like I'm in for a good time!

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

#MathSky #AlgComb Many people ask me what I study as an algebraic combinatorialist. I don't usually share too much to avoid doxxing myself (it's a niche area after all), but here's an interesting example I feel compelled to share: (continued in reply)

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

Despite all my recent success with my master's offer amongst other things, I sometimes can't help but think about how easily I can lose everything I worked for. I know it's unhealthy to get hung up on these things but I'm just so tired of letting people down again and again.

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

My first paper just got brutally rejected by Reviewer 1. What a great start to my academic career! (No hard feelings though, my second paper is much better and I'm just happy that I'm improving. I know that I'll make it one day, it's just a matter of time.) #MathSky #AcademicSky

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

I sometimes wonder how ultra-niche academic fields operate logistically. If the field is so small that every reasonable potential reviewer has a conflict of interest with you, who reviews the articles? Do they even bother anonymizing the peer review process in such a case? #MathSky #AcademicSky

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Two months ago I had zero papers on arXiv. Now I have two. Life is good.

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

These damn matroids and their q-analogues are blowing my mind #MathSky

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

I know I've been posting way too much #chess lately, but this game is too good not to post. 97% accuracy and a crazy sequence of 8 knight moves in a row to end the game, 2 of which are brilliant moves. One of my best bullet games ever. #chesspunks

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TotientQuotient @totientquotient.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

Lol twitter is down apparently. Anyways what a save by Wei Yi, didn't think Arjun would miss 24.Bxd5 #chess #chesspunks

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