Suddhasatta Saha

Netajian | Physics Enthusiast | Descendant of the Soil 🇮🇳

[Malvin @ManOfFocus_]

This mentality is everythiiiiiiiing.

[Physics In History @PhysInHistory]

The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind.

-- Nikola Tesla
(1856 - 1943)

[Saai Arora @SaaiArora]

Drake concerts in sf go crazy

[Curiosity @MAstronomers]

Why is calculus not introduced this way in schools?

[Pavel Durov @durov]

India’s IT ministry banned Telegram for one week because some users shared leaked exam questions.

This punishes 150M+ ordinary Telegram users in India — not the insiders who leaked the exam materials.

And the ban hasn't stopped anything. The leaks just moved to other apps.

[Physics In History @PhysInHistory]

The Bernoulli family was a remarkable dynasty of Swiss mathematicians and physicists who made significant contributions to various fields of science in the 17th and 18th centuries. The family produced 8 prominent academics, most notably Jacob, Johann, and Daniel Bernoulli, who were among the pioneers of calculus, differential equations, probability theory, and fluid mechanics.

[SirKazam {blu tik} @SirKazamJeevi]

Bihar’s HEALTH minister in the middle

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Falcon is a beautiful rocket

[Tesla Owners Silicon Valley @teslaownersSV]

Engineering is magic

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

❤️❤️ Happy Mother’s Day ❤️❤️

Appreciation to mothers everywhere who brought us all into the world and nurtured their beloved children 🥰

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A 21-year-old MIT student wrote a master's thesis in 1937 that Harvard's most famous professor of cognitive science later called "possibly the most important master's thesis of the century."

I read it at 2am and could not believe one paper had quietly built the entire foundation of every computer that exists today.

His name was Claude Shannon. The thesis is called "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits."

Every smartphone in your pocket. Every server farm running ChatGPT. Every chip Nvidia ships. Every line of code an engineer has ever written. All of it traces back to a single insight one graduate student had at 21 years old, working on a side project at MIT.

Here is the story almost nobody tells you.

Claude Shannon was born in 1916 in a small town in Michigan. He grew up tinkering. Built a telegraph between his house and a friend's house using barbed wire from a nearby fence. Repaired radios for the local department store. He studied both mathematics and electrical engineering at the University of Michigan because he could not decide which one he loved more. That refusal to choose is what eventually made him.

When he got to MIT for graduate school in 1936, he was assigned to operate a strange machine called the differential analyzer. It was room-sized. Mechanical. Built by Vannevar Bush. It used a tangle of gears, shafts, and electrical relays to solve calculus problems. Most students just operated it.

Shannon did something else. He stared at the relay circuits inside it. The way they clicked open and closed. The way they routed signals through the machine.

He noticed something nobody had noticed before.

The relays inside the machine had two states. Open or closed. On or off. One or zero. And the way the relays were wired together to make decisions looked exactly like a 90-year-old branch of mathematics that almost everyone had forgotten about. Boolean algebra. Invented by a British mathematician named George Boole in the 1850s. Boole had built a system of logic where statements could be true or false, and you could combine them with operators like AND, OR, and NOT to derive new statements.

For 90 years, Boolean algebra had been a curiosity. A philosophical tool. Nobody saw a practical use for it.

Shannon saw it.

He realized that an electrical circuit was not just an electrical circuit. It was a physical implementation of a logical statement. A switch that closed when both A and B were true was an AND gate. A switch that closed when either A or B was true was an OR gate. The entire branch of pure mathematics that Boole had invented as a thought experiment could be built out of wires and relays. And once you could build logic out of wires, you could build anything that could be expressed in logic out of wires too.

This was the insight that quietly created the modern world.

Before Shannon's thesis, electrical engineers designed circuits the way artisans built watches. By feel. By experience. By trial and error. Every new circuit was a craft project. There was no theory underneath it.

After Shannon's thesis, circuit design became a branch of mathematics. You could specify the logic you wanted on paper, and translate it directly into a wiring diagram. You could prove a circuit was correct before you built it. You could simplify a circuit by simplifying the underlying logical expression.

The MIT historian who reviewed his thesis described the shift in one sentence. It transformed circuit design from an art into a science.

Shannon was 21 years old when he wrote it.

That alone would have earned him a place in every computer science textbook on Earth.

But Shannon was not done. He spent the next 11 years working on a problem nobody had even framed properly. He wanted to know what information actually was. Not what messages were. Not what signals were. What information was. Mathematically. Quantitatively. As a measurable thing.

In 1948, while working at Bell Labs, he published a 79-page paper called "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." The paper invented the entire field of information theory in a single shot.

He proved that all information, regardless of whether it was a voice on a phone, a photograph in a magazine, or a chess move on a board, could be measured in a single unit. He named that unit the bit. Short for binary digit. It was the first time anyone had given information a unit of measurement.

The paper proved something that sounded impossible. He showed that you could send a message reliably through a noisy channel, with arbitrarily low error, as long as you encoded it correctly and stayed below a specific limit he called the channel capacity. Every Wi-Fi connection, every satellite signal, every cell phone call, every fiber optic transmission across the floor of the Pacific Ocean operates inside the mathematical bounds that Shannon proved in this single paper.

He did all of this in his spare time while officially working on cryptography for the war effort.

The strangest part of the man is what he did when he was not inventing the future.

He rode a unicycle through the hallways of Bell Labs at night while juggling. He built a chess-playing machine in 1950 that played a primitive form of chess decades before computers were supposed to be capable of it. He built an electronic mouse named "Theseus" that could solve a maze and remember the solution. It was one of the first machines on Earth that learned. He built a flame-throwing trumpet for fun. He had a closet full of unicycles in different sizes. He installed a chairlift across his backyard so his kids could get to the lake faster.

Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of artificial intelligence, said Shannon was the most genuinely playful great scientist he had ever met. Other people approached research with seriousness. Shannon approached it like a kid who had snuck into the toy store after closing time.

Stevens Institute of Technology called him the least known genius of the 20th century.

That title is exactly correct. Most people have heard of Einstein, Turing, von Neumann. Shannon's name barely registers outside engineering departments. Yet without his master's thesis, there is no digital circuit. Without his 1948 paper, there is no internet. Without his framework, there is no measurement of information at all, which means no compression, no error correction, no cryptography, no machine learning.

He died in 2001 at age 84, after years of Alzheimer's disease that took away his ability to recognize the world he had built. Most newspapers ran a small obituary. The world he had given us did not pause.

His thesis is on the MIT archive. His 1948 paper is on the Bell Labs site. Both are free. Both are short. Both are still readable today by anyone willing to spend an evening with them.

The least known genius of the 20th century is one click away from you.

Most people will never open the file.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Gilbert Strang, an MIT professor, taught the same linear algebra course for 62 years. When he delivered his final lecture in May 2023, students from around the world tuned in online to watch.

The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra. Millions of machine learning engineers, data scientists, quants, and self-taught programmers learned the essential math behind AI from his clear, free video lectures, even though most never stepped foot on the MIT campus.

Strang joined the MIT faculty in 1962 and retired in 2023. When MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2001–2002, he was one of the first to embrace it fully. While many professors hesitated, Strang saw it as an opportunity to share mathematics with everyone. He filmed his lectures and made them freely available.

He completely changed how linear algebra is taught. Instead of starting with abstract vector spaces and proofs, Strang began with something simple and visual: matrix multiplication. He built intuition first using concrete examples, then introduced more advanced ideas like eigenvectors and singular value decomposition. He insisted that students should be able to explain every concept with a small, tangible matrix before moving to theory.

Beyond the content, his teaching style stood out. He spoke to students with genuine respect, patience, and kindness, never using words like “obviously” or “trivially.” He regularly paused to check if anyone was lost and treated beginners as thoughtfully as he would his colleagues.

As a result, Strang became the default linear algebra teacher for much of the planet. Universities in many countries began recommending his lectures to their own students. Some even replaced their in-person courses with his videos because they could not match their clarity.

His final lecture ended with a long standing ovation. Strang seemed surprised by the applause, smiled humbly, and simply thanked everyone.

In his short comment under the YouTube video, he expressed gratitude for a wonderful life of teaching and hoped others would continue teaching the subject well. No self-promotion, no grand farewell—just quiet sincerity.

When you add up every version, every upload, help sessions, and all the different recordings MIT has shared over the years, the total has surpassed 20 million views.

Today, the full course, including all lectures, problem sets, and solutions, remains freely available on MIT OpenCourseWare. One of the most important mathematical foundations of modern AI is still just one click away.

[Byomkesh @byomkesbakshy]

Pakistan 😹😹
#Ceasefire

[SagasofBharat (talesbymiirabelle) @SagasofBharat]

GEMS OF ABDUL KALAM:

We all know him as the Missile Man of India and one of the most secular President. But there’s another side to his secularism.

Was he actually a secular? Will let u all judge for yourself.

A detailed (THREAD) since many seemed to be interested.

[Dr. Michael F. Bird @mbird12]

The front page of the Australian newspaper

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Matter,
Energy &
Intelligence

[Aditya Dhar @AdityaDharFilms]

🙏🧿♥️

#DhurandharTheRevenge releases worldwide on 19 March, on Gudi Padwa, Ugadi, and Eid.

Hindi | Telugu | Tamil | Kannada | Malayalam

@ranveersingh @rampal72 @duttsanjay @actormaddy #AkshayeKhanna @saraarjunn @therakeshbedi @adityadharfilms #JyotiDeshpande @dhar_lokesh @officialjiostudios @b62studios @tseries.official @jiohotstar @stargoldofficial

Oh, and one more thing.
Don't leave your seats until the credits have stopped rolling 😉

[Night Sky Today @NightSkyToday]

Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.

– Nikola Tesla

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Rocket garden at Starbase.

You can see this from the public highway.

[Defence Decode® @DefenceDecode]

DRDO today inaugurated the National Workshop on Advanced Legged Robotics (NWALR-2025) at Pune.