Profesor Manuel Castejon-Limas

[Mike Schroepfer @schrep]

Worst part of moving from operator to investor is saying no. I remember every no I got 26 years ago (including one investor falling asleep during my pitch!). It kills me to say no and I really actually mean it when I say I want you to crush it. Im guilty of doing pro bono work for plenty of folks we didn’t invest in. I wish I could invest in much more!!!!

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

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.

[Hadas Weiss @weiss_hadas]

peer reviewer finding a flaw in your argument

[Profesor Manuel Castejon-Limas @oakstr20]

Nice introductory book.

[Paras Chopra @paraschopra]

This is a fantastic, visually stunning, free introductory book on deep learning.

Highly recommended for curious people who want the lay of the land.

[Simon Willison @simonw]

Microsoft released a new terminal text editor! It's called Microsoft Edit, it's open source, it's tiny (about 250KB as a Rust binary) and it works cross-platform. They built it for Windows 11 - I've been trying it out on my Mac and it's a nice alternative to Vim or nano

[William Gilpin @wgilpin0]

We present Panda: a foundation model for nonlinear dynamics pretrained on 20,000 chaotic ODE discovered via evolutionary search. Panda zero-shot forecasts unseen ODE best-in-class, and can forecast PDE despite having never seen them during training (1/8)
https://t.co/AuWFmVal8o

[John B. Holbein @JohnHolbein1]

Nice.

[Peyman Milanfar @docmilanfar]

The choice of nonlinear activation functions in neural networks can be tricky and important.

That's because iterating (i.e. repeatedly composing) even simple nonlinear functions can lead to unstable, or even chaotic behavior, even with something as simple as a quadratic.

1/n

[Grupo Robotica Universidad de León @RoboticaUnileon]

🚀 ¡Impulsa tu carrera con nuestro Máster en Robótica e Inteligencia Artificial! Aprende de expertos, trabaja con robots reales y participa en proyectos innovadores. ¡Inscríbete ahora!
+Info: https://t.co/B8IjrfelH9

#Robótica #IA #Innovación #DesarrolloProfesional #Máster

[Yann LeCun @ylecun]

New paper: turns out you can train deep nets without normalization layers by replacing them with a parameterized tanh()

[Grupo Robotica Universidad de León @RoboticaUnileon]

Hoy hemos visitado la @EIAF_ULE para probar nuestros robots Leo Rover @LeoRoverTech y @UnitreeRobotics Go2 en las fincas de prácticas y grabar unos rosbags.

@unileon #robotics #agriculture #ROS2

[CyLTV @cyltv]

Esta semana en #EspacioAbierto | El grado de ingeniería aeroespacial, el más demandado.

📅 Este viernes a las 22:05h en La 7

Diego Domínguez, coordinador Grado Ingeniería Aeroespacial @unileon ⬇

[Grupo Robotica Universidad de León @RoboticaUnileon]

Sabíais que tenemos un Máster, ¿no?

👇👇
https://t.co/JqSwYtN4KV

[Diario de León @diariodeleon]

La 'U' de Olmedo conectará directamente Galicia con Valladolid y, desde esta ciudad, con otras capitales de Castilla y León, Asturias, Cantabria, País Vasco o Barcelona 👇 https://t.co/KrNyNV9C3q

[Greg Brockman @gdb]

Introducing GPT-4o, our new model which can reason across text, audio, and video in real time.

It's extremely versatile, fun to play with, and is a step towards a much more natural form of human-computer interaction (and even human-computer-computer interaction):

[Demis Hassabis @demishassabis]

Thrilled to announce AlphaFold 3 which can predict the structures and interactions of nearly all of life’s molecules with state-of-the-art accuracy including proteins, DNA and RNA. Biology is a complex dynamical system so modeling interactions is crucial https://t.co/Gs4GoOB3fD

[Didier 'Dirac's ghost' Gaulin @DiracGhost]

Category theory for computing science is a classic, in my opinion, and the most beginner friendly text on categories that i have ever read. The best thing about this book? It's available for free on McGill University's website.

[Francisco Lera @FranciscoLera]

First day of Gentlebots in Festival Nacional de Robótica 24, Paredes de Coura. #Robocup@home competition @IntellRobotLabs and @RoboticaUnileon. Go, Go, Go!!! 🤖🤖🤖

[AI Breakfast @AiBreakfast]

3D explorable worlds built from Google Street View data.

From the researchers who made Gaussian splatting:

[Francisco Martín 🇪🇺🇪🇸 @Fmrico]

Irene presented our join paper with @RoboticaUnileon at ICARSC, related to our work at @CORESENSE_EU