Jayme Maultasch

Husband, Father, Ad Guy, Political junkie, Web3. Views expressed here are my own. JMaultasch.eth

[Nathan Baschez @nbaschez]

This is so cool and so obviously the future

[Jayme Maultasch @JMaultasch]

Passionate believer in paying for content. Outraged that @TheAthletic charged me despite my @nytimes subscription and can’t figure out how to refund it.

GROSS.

This kind of predatory subscription nonsense is why people won’t subscribe!

[Jayme Maultasch @JMaultasch]

This is beautiful. We need more of this. How do we identify master teachers and record them and share with a broader audience? Better if we can reward that excellence!

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

An MIT professor taught the same math course for 62 years, and the day he retired, students from every country on earth showed up online to watch him give his final lecture.

I opened the playlist at 2am and ended up watching three of them back to back.

His name is Gilbert Strang. The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra.

Every machine learning engineer, every data scientist, every quant, every self-taught programmer who actually understands how AI works learned the math from this one man. Most of them never set foot on MIT's campus. They just opened a free playlist on YouTube and let him teach.

Here's the story almost nobody tells you.

Strang joined the MIT math faculty in 1962. He retired in 2023. That is 61 years of standing at the same chalkboard teaching the same subject to 18-year-olds.

The interesting part is what he did when MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2002. Most professors were skeptical. They worried that putting their lectures online would make their classrooms irrelevant. Strang did not hesitate. He said his life's mission was to open mathematics to students everywhere. He filmed every lecture and gave it away.

The decision quietly changed how the world learns math.

For decades linear algebra was taught the wrong way. Professors started with abstract vector spaces and proofs about field axioms. Students drowned in the abstraction. Most never recovered. They walked out believing they were bad at math when they had simply been taught in an order that nobody's brain is built to absorb.

Strang inverted the entire curriculum.

He started with matrix multiplication. Something you can write down on paper. Something you can compute by hand. Something you can see. Then he showed his students that everything else in linear algebra eigenvectors, singular value decomposition, orthogonality, the four fundamental subspaces was just a different lens for understanding what the matrix was actually doing under the hood.

His rule was strict. If a student could not explain a concept using a concrete 3 by 3 example, that student did not actually understand the concept yet. The abstraction was supposed to come last, not first. The intuition was the foundation. The proofs were just confirmation that the intuition was correct.

The second thing Strang changed was the classroom itself. He said please and thank you to his students. Every single lecture. He paused mid-derivation to ask "am I OK?" to check if anyone was lost. He never used the word "obviously" or "trivially" because he knew exactly what those words do to a student who is one step behind. He treated 19-year-olds learning math for the first time the way he treated his own colleagues. With patience. With respect. With the assumption that they belonged in the room.

For 62 years.

The result is something that has never happened in the history of education. A single math professor became the default teacher of his subject for the entire planet.

Universities in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria, every country with a computer science department, started telling their own students to just watch Strang's lectures. The University of Illinois revised its linear algebra course to do almost no in-person lecturing. The reason was honest. The professor said they could not compete with the videos.

His final lecture was in May 2023.

The auditorium was packed with students who had never met him before. He walked to the chalkboard, taught for an hour, and at the end the entire room stood and applauded. He looked confused for a moment, like he genuinely did not understand why they were cheering. Then he smiled and waved them off and walked out.

His written comment under the YouTube video of that final lecture was four sentences long. He said teaching had been a wonderful life. He said he was grateful to everyone who saw the importance of linear algebra. He said the movement of teaching it well would continue because it was right.

That was it. No book promotion. No farewell speech. No legacy management.

The man whose teaching is the foundation of modern AI just thanked the audience and went home.

20 million views. Zero ego. The entire engine of the AI revolution sits on top of math that millions of people learned for free from one quiet professor in Cambridge.

The course is still on MIT OpenCourseWare. Every lecture, every problem set, every exam, every solution. Free.

The most important math course of the 21st century is sitting one click away from you. Most people will never open it.

[Jayme Maultasch @JMaultasch]

@andrewjiang This made me smile. I totally had this vibe and built it for bar/bat mitzvah gifts and weddings: https://t.co/sG0mwpQujU I think when I started to build the family graph I knew I had gone too far. I didnt build to launch more to get my head around the power of these AI tools.

[Jayme Maultasch @JMaultasch]

@ivaavimusic @DegenApe99 Super helpful!

[Josh Pigford @Shpigford]

the typical position about AI is that it can't be creative. that creativity is inherently "human". and while that might be technically true, i don't believe it's functionally true.

creativity is simply taking primitives (paint, pixels, words, sounds, objects, etc) and mashing them together in unique ways, usually with the goal of eliciting some sort of feeling in the consumer (sorry, i know that's very clinical).

and what AI is very good at is exploring every variation possible of combining primitives.

so at that point, it becomes a UX issue. how do you surface the "best" combinations? but because "best" is entirely subjective, it's actually not that difficult of a problem to solve.

you simply learn the tastes of the human and optimize for that.

and want to push the boundaries a bit (in a way that art typically does)? well you can actually do that even more efficiently for every single user because AI already knows a given human's "taste" baseline and can optimize for pushing the boundaries in a way that's just the right amount for them.

i'm not arguing that human creativity is a useless endeavor. but i am saying that writing off AI as being *incapable* of what we call creativity or ignoring that it exists won't change reality.

[Reverend Jordan Wells @WellsJorda89710]

🚨To every Black person tempted by the antisemitic wave sweeping right now:🚨

Back when white mobs lynched us in the streets...
When we had no money, no power, and literally no movement...

Who stood with us? Who risked everything?

The Jews.

They weren't just allies—they were family in the fight.
- Jewish leaders co-founded the NAACP in 1909 and funded/led it for generations when no one else would.
- When Dr. King and our people were arrested, beaten, jailed—Jewish lawyers defended us for free, and Jewish money paid bail bonds and court fees while others turned away.
- In Freedom Summer '64, half the white volunteers risking death to register Black voters? Jewish.
- Rabbi Heschel marched arm-in-arm with MLK in Selma—our struggles linked forever.

Without their blood, treasure, solidarity, and courage—there is no Civil Rights Movement as we know it. No Voting Rights Act. No dream realized.

That's why I stand with the Jews.
They were our only true friends when this country hated us—when doors slammed shut and ropes hung high. They showed up, bled, and built with us.

So to my people joining this demonic, divisive hate today:

Pause. Remember. Honor the alliance that freed us.

Our histories are bound. Our freedoms were won together.

Betray that, and you betray the very martyrs who died for our rights.

Black-Jewish unity forged the dream. Don't let hate destroy it.

I stand with my Jewish brothers and sisters—always. ✊🏾🤝✡️🇮🇱

Repost if truth > trends. If gratitude > division. If history matters.

#BlackJewishAlliance #RememberOurAllies #StandTogether #CivilRightsTruth #NoToAntisemitism

[Jonathan Greenberg @JGreenbergSez]

Whomever did oppo for the Cuomo campaign should probably find other work.

[Miami HEAT @MiamiHEAT]

83 points. The bucket that made HISTORY

[Jayme Maultasch @JMaultasch]

Best Miami sports moment in a long time. Bam 83 CRAZY

[Marc J. Spears @MarcJSpears]

Bam passes Kobe by reaching 83 points. Second only to Wilt’s 100 point game in 1962.

[Marc J. Spears @MarcJSpears]

Bam passes Kobe by reaching 83 points. Second only to Wilt’s 100 point game in 1962.

[Jayme Maultasch @JMaultasch]

War as SEO feels very post-modern!

[John Bourscheid 🇺🇸 🚀 @bourscheid]

BREAKING: Per a source close to SEO, Donald Trump insisted the Iran War be named “Operation Epic Fury” so that when people searched “Trump ep” in search engines, autocorrect would suggest “Trump Epic Fury” instead of “Trump Epstein”. Absolutely pathetic.

[Gabby Deutch @GSDeutch]

I profiled Sam Bregman, the cowboy hat-wearing Jewish lawyer who's running for governor of New Mexico (and, yes, the father of MLB star Alex Bregman)
https://t.co/DqUf6PyUaK

[Pliny the Liberator 🐉󠅫󠄼󠄿󠅆󠄵󠄐󠅀󠄼󠄹󠄾󠅉󠅭 @elder_plinius]

@AnthropicAI it’s only Claude if it’s distilled in the Silicon Valley region of California 😤

[The Hockey News @TheHockeyNews]

Jack Hughes: the first player in hockey history to have a Bar Mitzvah and a Golden Goal! Pretty cool!

[Jayme Maultasch @JMaultasch]

We cleared TSA PreCheck at FLL around 6AM and it was running normal service.

[Josh Rogin @joshrogin]

I went through TSA PreCheck at 7:30 and it was functioning as usual FWIW.

[Nick DeJesus 🛒🎉 - Former Unpaid CTO @BTPipeline @Dayhaysoos]

There are zero people outside of twitter that I can talk to about the OpenClaw acquisition.

This is the real loneliness epidemic

[Jayme Maultasch @JMaultasch]

So proud of my girl!

[BBYO Insider @BBYOInsider]

Candidate Hayley Maultasch of Nassau Suffolk Region has taken the floor for the election of International Gizborit. #AZABBGElections #AZABBGIC2026

[BBYO Insider @BBYOInsider]

Candidate Hayley Maultasch of Nassau Suffolk Region has taken the floor for the election of International Gizborit. #AZABBGElections #AZABBGIC2026