Matt Mack

Hard-of-hearing neurospicy chronically online mathematician, cellist with a giant backlog of games & books. [email protected];

[Matt Mack @matthras]

Alright folks, those of you who've seen me posting #TSPart every now and then, here's the Python code to do it!

After a lot of slaving away and fretting over small details and making sure it's beginner friendly, I'm finally comfortable to advertise it!

https://t.co/0fPUWYlEc4

[Matt Mack @matthras]

Today feels like an 'eat myself into an afternoon food coma nap' day and I'm tempted to do it with KFC.

Doesn't help that I'm doing a talk tomorrow of which I have all the ideas but still need to write them all into the slides asd;lfkajsd;flakj

[Matt Mack @matthras]

Me because I'm deaf in my right ear and hearing from my left even with a hearing aid does get tiring at times 🙃

[Stormi @Stormi_luv]

What has EARS but does NOT listen ??

[Matt Mack @matthras]

I know an Alexander who goes by Xan. Thought that was pretty awesome of him to break the mold like that.

[mollie writes stuff @vuse_lover]

Met a guy recently named Jonathan who goes by Nathan. I didn’t even know you could do that

[Matt Mack @matthras]

If there's anything I've appreciated within last few weeks of my PhD research it's doing pen & paper maths again (but on my iPad with ALL the pretty colours!).

It's the perfect amount of isolated/calming/curl-up-into-a-ball-on-the-couch-and-get-lost-in-my-thoughts.

[Matt Mack @matthras]

Shamelessly asking free Claude to generate nonsense datasets with weird stipulations because how else?

Latest prompt: "Give me a dataset that represents a noisy linechart indicating "number of browser tabs open over time". It should be bimodal, and have one or two sharp drops."

[Matt Mack @matthras]

Once again, cursing past me for creating more work for current me even though it's all for good causes. grumblegrumble

Really is impossible to predict how much time I need to allocate to certain tasks until I've done said task a few times.

[ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ @alpeh_v]

mathematicians love putting "an introduction to" in the title of a textbook that contains the most fucked up and domain specific information possible

[Matt Mack @matthras]

I'm so stuuuuuuuuuuuuupid why didn't I think to look up past PhD/MPhil theses to get a better idea of how to structure my thesis /facepalm /flails

Lovely how my brain throws up mental roadblocks that I'm unable to put words to until a supervisor suggests it.

[Matt Mack @matthras]

Making yet another random attempt to curate an environment (separate from my other ones) so that I can actually make a reasonable attempt to get through my backlog of physical books. Bed definitely doesn't work.

It's crazy how difficult my brain is making this out to be, ugh.

[Matt Mack @matthras]

/mentally files away to use on a future student

[Daniel Berk 🐝 @danielcberk]

Just came across the most legendary email response of all time from my college professor 13 years ago.

[Matt Mack @matthras]

Apple cake was made last night!

I'm thinking I want the apples to be softer when I bite into them, so I'm thinking they'll have to be cooked down somehow before adding to the cake mixture. Basically want the same bite-feel like the Maccas apple pie.

[Matt Mack @matthras]

Current Mood: Too much nondimensionalising. Severe desire to bake a cake (which I'll probably fulfill this afternoon) 🙃

[Matt Mack @matthras]

/does another research-worthy project unrelated to my PhD topic

"No, no not like that!"

[jon repetti @pourfairelevide]

idk I think PhD students should take that 5 year stipend and do anything they want with the time as long as they’re fulfilling baseline contractual obligations. Life is short and there are many worthwhile paths

[Matt Mack @matthras]

Nondimensionalisation feels like such an oddity in terms of mathematical techniques, there's no denying it's useful but I haven't figured out why I feel so /weird/ about it. Hopefully the answer will reveal itself to me in due course.

[Matt Mack @matthras]

@suchenzang Yep. The recent news and discussion has generated far too much noise for any reasonable level-headed mathematician to want to deal with any of it.

My applied mathematician colleagues are still minding their own business and working on other useful things not needing AI.

[Matt Mack @matthras]

Usually I try to stay off social media in response to various world/political events because I can't stand the noise, but this is the first time I'm doing this because I'm so annoyed about the noise on recent maths/AI news. Sheesh 🙄

[Matt Mack @matthras]

@dzackgarza They could be trying other stuff but only the successful results are coming from these areas so far /shrugs

That's why I'm mostly unfazed at these results as an applied mathematician.

[Matt Mack @matthras]

@leanyaritai Hugely depends on the topics. I'm in mathematical biology and there's lots of niche applications that many people wouldn't think much about.

[Matt Mack @matthras]

I'm trying to do some nondimensionalisation and my brain keeps seizing up because "What do you mean I can freely choose what substitutions to make?!"

Still a good exercise to break the minds of those who think maths is all about algorithms, though.

[Matt Mack @matthras]

Today's Misheard: "bonferroni correction" as "bonsoni correction"

Not surprised, the 'f' is a higher frequency consonant which definitely eluded my hearing!