Calvin McPhail-Snyder

Mathematician working at Duke. I study hyperbolic geometry and topological quantum field theories. he/him/his

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

Hi everyone! (which is no one right now.) This is intended to be a professional/public account where I focus mostly on math.

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@littmath @postdocforever He’s a noted transphobic “journalist” who also talks a lot about how MeToo went too far.

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@catdadpotat @focusfronting I once saw a really cool art piece in the Tate Modern about this! It was a video of a conductor shot so you could only see his hands, on a huge screen in a dark enclosed room. It was super disorienting and neat, but maybe too much for being jet lagged so we only lasted 30 seconds

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@ainesanapulla @no_earthquake How you can you not get excited about coaches saying things like “Trips Right Yo-Yo 60 Y Stick”?

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@colinb8 @kareem_carr He’s saying what I did (the first derivative of the red curves doesn’t converge to the green curve) in more informal language

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@colinb8 @kareem_carr Here the convergence is uniform but the first derivative doesn’t converge even pointwise. Since arclength depends on the derivative it’s not surprising the red and green curves have different lengths

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@elfstrogenic @lastpositivist It’s kind of funny that he recruited a bunch of people to his intellectual movement/cult by writing Harry Potter fanfic

[Washington Commanders @Commanders]

You gotta believe

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@TaliaRinger But seriously, good luck and it DOES get better

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@TaliaRinger I’m amazed she’s sleeping regularly enough you have a schedule!

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@TimHenke9 @Daanniii6 I agree with everything you said! Plus I’m not really an expert on the general physics ideas.

I would emphasize that TQFTs are quite special: they are good to study but a general QFT (like QED, say) is more complicated

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@Daanniii6 @TimHenke9 That is just one example but it’s on of the major motivations. You can also express lots of Floer-type things in this language, but it’s much harder or maybe not computable (I know less about this)

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@Daanniii6 @TimHenke9 For quantum Chern-Simons theory these things are all explicitly computable, although you might get some very complicated sum/matrix/tensor/higher linear morphism and you might need to know a fair amount of representation theory to do the calculations

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@no_earthquake @GabiElectra @VitruviusGrind Water is very expensive in CA

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@shittyprogram @focusfronting @rohn_jawls I was a little confused why they switched from being the racist kind of postrat to being the singularity kind

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@TimHenke9 @bwebste It’s the location of the Springfield the Simpsons live in

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@AniJhahaha @christapeterso Infamously the Nazis said they had created a “Volksgemeinschaft” which you could translate as “people’s community” but they meant more like “racially [pure] society”

https://t.co/mQEYuCsLDg

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@AniJhahaha @christapeterso “Volk” is hard to translate: it can mean “people” but also “race” or “ethnicity” or “nation”

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@APotAaaYM @ryanyang0 Obviously studying math intensively from a young age will help make you good at doing mathematical research, but that doesn’t mean being really good at the contests is what’s making people Fields Medalists

[Calvin McPhail-Snyder @esselltwo]

@APotAaaYM @ryanyang0 Being a Fields Medalist and being good at research are not the same thing!