floralfractals

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40% really is the 50% of 80%...

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“Take year 3 student Emma Glenfield, who started with a simple question about magpies and wound up conducting some cutting-edge research almost by accident."

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Thurston's Orange Peel Theory

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SCIENCE THEATRE omg as a theatre person and a scientist I am so into this. I've had such a craving for more works that talk about science (and the human aspects of science). Like, they go so well togther. I'd love to hear more!

Hell yea! My current research is on Copenhagen, a play set during WWII about German physicist Werner Heisenberg and the half-Jewish Niels Bohr meeting and discussing nuclear physics. There is also a 2002 movie about it I believe.

There's a few works now that integrate science and theatre, though the overlap is a bit new. I mostly like the more serious works that deal with deep topics in a kind of literary theatre, using science as a topic and putting focus on actual good shows. There's also some more science-focussed plays that use theatre as more of a means than an end, telling a story about research methodology without pretending to have any literary qualities. An example is An Immaculate Misconception. Oh, and of course the fun zany experiment-filled crazy scientist shows!

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I gotta learn to math harder for my career path. Im ok at math but how do I Like it

I mean. I can't tell you to like something you don't, but

The most important thing I found to liking (or at least appreciating) mathematics is to see the underlying structure. 5 + 7 is the same as 7 + 5, but 7 - 5 and 5 - 7 are two completely different things. Why is differentiating (looking at slopes) opposite to integrating (looking at surfaces)? If we can model two or three dimensional phenomena, nothing is stopping us from thinking about four, five, seven thousand or infinitely many dimensions.

Another way is to look at the applications and wanting to understand the theories behind them. Maths got us to the moon and allows us to look at pictures of Jupiter. Set theory is used in linguistics and Fourier analysis is applied in music production. The same concepts that are used for computer graphics can also model traffic streams and quantum physics!

Finally, and that is the third thing I think people are struggling with, is understanding. It is often important, fun and cool to not just know that things are true, but also to know why they are. Why are there infinitely prime numbers? What causes infinite sums to be approximated by finitely many terms? Why can you sometimes swap the order of integration, when that sometimes completely screws up your calculations? I don't know your situation and the maths you need to know, but by practising you can learn to write or read proofs, and with that you can understand anything you need to know.

I hope this helps!

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I saw your post about math, and I just wanted to say, I'm glad to find another math lover. What got you into math as a kid? (Presuming you got into math as a kid, my bad if not) For me it was Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. I just loved how the numbers meant something and eventually realized they ALWAYS mean something. Sorry if my reason for liking math is childish.

That's really cool! I never played that game, but I should give it a try.

As a kid I absolutely hated the arithmetic we had to learn in school, but I always read this little book series called 1001 facts

It had facts about all sorts of topics, from history to language, but it also had a math puzzle about Euler graphs ("did you know you can draw these things without lifting your pen or passing the same stroke twice?"). The puzzle contained a box with a cross, which famously is NOT Euler, but I believed the book and spent the better part of my days trying to figure out how to draw it.

When I was a bit older, I often watched youtube videos on math (vihart was great, numberphile too even though I didn't always understand). In school I had a lot of teachers that I didn't vibe with, so it took me until age 15 before I started to enjoy school maths!

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Thank you Wolfram|Alpha, this is the worst unit of length I’ve ever seen

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Btw re: my current projects, I'm working (almost finishing) on a thesis about mathematical quantum theory! I'm pretty proud of it so far, and it turns out quantum is wayy more interesting to me than ergodic theory (sorry ET fans). There will also be a chapter about science communication about quantum topics in the theatre play Copenhagen, so things have been pretty exciting!

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updating this: info about reading the thesis can be found here. the 2024 paper has not happened, but my old supervisors were considering to make one.

hi just saw your post about a function you were doing your thesis on l? it was like from 2023,, oops. im actually intrigued if you wanna share about it !! it seems cool!

hi! thanks for your interest :) ive finished my thesis on calkin-wilf dynamics in december 2023, and youre one of many people whove asked me to learn more. thats why i did explain some stuff about my son in this post i made back in january of that year

of course that was just the beginning of my thesis period so over the months i did make some more posts explaining things about or adjecent to my thesis. for example here and here. theres also this post about continued fractions but i struggled to explain them in an understandable way so im not really proud of it.

also the goal of 2024 is to publish a paper about the same topic, so ill keep everyone posted on that!

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Yknow what? Maybe I should be more active again.

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I've been known as the cool thesis math guy for a while now, but truth is I worked on that thang for a year, submitted it almost crying and never looked back, nowadays I'm doing shit nowhere even near that topic

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I'm sure you've been asked this before but is your thesis available to read anywhere? I'm a physicist and would love a look!

No worries if not, will keep an eye out for any papers you do on the topic :3!

It has been asked before, and as a matter of fact it is! I found out very recently that all theses from my university are public documents, and they can be found on the website of my university.

Unfortunately, it also attaches my full name on it, and I don't want to doxx myself in front of the entire internet just yet. If you (or anyone else for that matter) is interested, please shoot me a private message and we can chat about it!

Aside from that, I heard my supervisors were maybe interested in publishing a paper themselves, so please do keep an eye out for that.

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Saltyposting aside WHAT IS GOING ON WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE

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This post has been making the rounds again and the update to this is that this is still true, but somehow I'm also experiencing the OPPOSITE problem.

In the last two years since I made this post, I've been moving away a bit from just math. Rather, I'm now combining it with more societal topics (science policy, museumology, artscience, citizen science etc) (I'm writing a new thesis about science theatre and I'm almost done!)

Finally people in the public start to actually understand what I'm doing or working on, but what happens when you tell the average mathematician you want to work with art and culture for a living? They don't care. Not only that, they actively do not understand.

I say average because of course there's more nuance, but in my circles there's a lot of people who do not care about anything but STEM, programming or earning money. And that shit fucking hurts.

The curse of a mathematician is to work in a disliked field

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6 has three 2's which is a good amount but of a relatively smaller number, whereas 6 has two 3's, which is fewer, but 3 is a bigger number, so it really comes to about the same. so youve got options

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You have to admit it's funny

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I'm, above all else, a tangentgirl. always saying shit like "sidenote," "oh also," "by the way,"