Michael Tiller

Engineer, husband, father, board gamer♟ and technology enthusiast. Author of "Modelica by Example" and the "Modelica Playground"

[Pete Buttigieg @PeteButtigieg]

You could start by walking down the hall. See why your boss keeps pardoning people convicted of money laundering, wire fraud, tax evasion, and securities fraud.

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

Jon Haidt @jonhaidt is one of the greatest psychologists of the 21st century, having illuminated moral cognition, the relation between emotion and intellect, the perils of politicization and viewpoint homogeneity in social science, and the roots of the youth mental health decline. That NYU students should protest this wise and brilliant man as their commencement speaker is a backhand vindication of his diagnosis of what's wrong in higher ed. Our sometimes coauthor @PamelaParesky explains: Reports of The Death of 'Woke' May Be Greatly Exaggerated https://t.co/IN2IWfdzNi

[Dr. Arthur Brooks @arthurbrooks]

In my view, @jonhaidt is the most visionary social scientist of my generation.

[John Wood Jr. @JohnRWoodJr]

Whether you agree with him or not though, Ben is taking a stand in a very aggressive way for a certain side of things within the conservative movement and the larger Trump coalition.

When Joe Biden was in power, it was easier to focus fire on a common enemy without fracturing a broader conservative audience. But since the relevant fight has largely turned within, I think Ben has been willing to spend his influence pushing what he believes in at the expense of friendships and followers.

I don’t endorse everything he has said and done. But I respect that choice as a matter of principle.

His media platform may be eroding to whatever degree, but what he has gained is the success of his positions in the world and an influence within the administration and the leadership of the Republican Party that has palpably shifted the direction of the nation.

He may not be as wealthy for it at the end of the day. But I expect he is ultimately happy with that exchange.

[Stefan Smith @TheStefanSmith]

It’s literally God’s oldest rule not to do this.

[Michael Tiller @mtiller]

Me too! As a Minnesotan and Michigander, I feel this very strongly. I’ve always LOVED the Canadian national anthem.

[David French @DavidAFrench]

I love this so much.

[Michael Tiller @mtiller]

@mrtiller @YouTube If he had not pronounced it “E”, I would have immediately stopped watching.

[Michael Tiller @mtiller]

Interestingly, I had no idea Strang taught linear algebra. My first exposure was his book on applied math that was the textbook for one of my classes in graduate school. But I thoroughly enjoyed the subject.

[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.

[Michael Tiller @mtiller]

*Strang

[Michael Tiller @mtiller]

Wow, I never thought @CHSommers and I would both be Gilbert Strange fans. Small world.

[Christina Hoff Sommers @CHSommers]

Just watched Professor Strang’s first lecture. He’s fantastic.

[Michael Tiller @mtiller]

@Jesse_Leg @CHSommers @grok what were the actual issues in this race. For example, what were the stated positions of both candidates and what public statements or acts by the candidates impacted the race?

[PBS News @NewsHour]

In his second administration, President Trump’s family, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner and sons Eric and Don Jr., are expanding their business ventures, earning hundreds of millions of dollars and prompting fresh concerns about influence peddling and conflicts of interest.

@ElizLanders reports.

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

Neuroscientist explains how the SAT is redefining education

[Michael Tiller @mtiller]

This is an excellent take!

[Tim Alberta @TimAlberta]

My conviction remains:

God did not ordain Donald Trump to rescue the American church, or revive the American church, or redeem the American church.

God ordained Donald Trump to test the American church. And the American church has failed.

[Michael Tiller @mtiller]

Wow, what a thread. First the sad flex about hulking Tim C attacking someone’s family then getting ratioed from both sides of the political spectrum for being both a boot licker and an entitled putz.

[Tom Morello @tmorello]

Today’s the 30th anniversary of RATM’S um, ‘memorable’ performance on SNL. There was a fight onstage between our crew and SNL stage hands moments before our performance, wrestling over some upside down American flags which adorned our amps. Timmy C then attacked host/billionarie/presidential candidate Steve Forbes’ family in the dressing room with a wadded up flag. Secret Service flooded the hallways. SNL cut (censored?) our second song and kicked us out onto the sidewalk.
Evil Empire entered the Billboard Album Chart at #1.

[RŌNIN @ronin21btc]

What an incredible English gentleman.

He stood up to shake hands at the age of 90.

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

Congratulations to @CoachDustyMay, Elliot Cadeau, and @UMichBBall on winning their first title since 1989! This team dominated the tournament from start to finish. Well deserved. Go Blue!

[Michael Tiller @mtiller]

I think this is just as powerful a message when viewed from a humanist perspective. Furthermore, I appreciate the respectful way he tries to phrase this independent of his own beliefs.

[NASA @NASA]

As communities gather this weekend, @AstroVicGlover reflects on the shared spaceship we all call home: Earth.

[Michael Tiller @mtiller]

This is exactly why I don’t buy the idea that without religion, we would be adrift in moral relativism. 🙄

[David French @DavidAFrench]

This is utterly deranged authoritarianism. The way in which so many MAGA Christians have totally lost their moorings in this moment is more than disturbing—it’s dangerous.

[Michael Tiller @mtiller]

Not only is this fascinating, but THIS is the best form of social media. No political valence, no poser influencer bullshit, just interesting content.

But seriously, read the thread…it is really interesting. Another profound gender difference worth understanding better.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

You have your mother's cells in your brain right now. If she ever carried you, yours are in hers.

Scientists looked at the brains of 59 women after they died, ages 32 to 101. In 63% of them, they found their sons' DNA scattered across different brain regions. The cells had traveled from the womb, through the blood, past the wall that normally keeps foreign material out of the brain, and settled in. The oldest woman still carrying her son's cells in her brain was 94. In mice, those cells became functional brain cells.

The transfer starts as early as 7 weeks into pregnancy. Your cells slip through the placenta into your mother's body. Hers slips into yours. One study found a mother still had her son's cells in her blood 27 years after giving birth. After delivery, between 50 and 75% of women carry their child's cells. During pregnancy, up to 6% of a woman's blood DNA comes from the baby.

When a mother's heart gets damaged during or after pregnancy, the baby's cells travel to the injury, latch on, and turn into beating heart cells, blood vessel lining, and muscle. Heart failure tied to pregnancy has a 50% spontaneous recovery rate, better than every other kind. The Mount Sinai team behind the research thinks the baby's cells are fixing the mother's heart from the inside.

The cancer data caught me off guard. A study compared healthy women to women with breast cancer. 85% of the healthy group still carried their children's cells. Only 64% of the breast cancer group did. That works out to about 4x lower odds of getting breast cancer if you kept those cells. The working theory is that they patrol the body and catch cancer cells before they grow.

A 2022 study found that in developing mouse brains, a mother's cells controlled the brain's immune cells, preventing them from cutting too many connections between brain cells. Your mom's cells helped wire your brain before you were born.

And it stacks across generations. A woman can carry cells from her kids, from her own mother, and even from pregnancies her mother had before her. Three generations of cells from different people, living inside one body.