The talk site for Not Only Truth But Supreme Beauty, a mathematical proofs appreciation blog, and for One Thousand Adventures in Mathematics, blog about the private professional life of a mathematician. If you have your own question about a post on any of these three sites, just reblog. Be polite, or at least reasonable, and we can continue the conversation over here :-)
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âWhat you can do is enter the command correctlyâŚâ
This part cracked me up.
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uses the royal "we" sometimes just to freak out the transphobes who think I use they/them because I'm possessed by demons
#honestly using 'we' in the place of 'I' feels very gender and I can't explain it#prev tags#well well well do i have just the field of study for you#welcome to math class your pronouns are we/us
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[excessive citations]
#frankly your preacher is a prophet#me age 10: starts wearing sweats all the time#me age 13: take a guess#me age 25: whoops pansexual#admittedly I would have preferred the last bit earlier#but who are we to rush gods design
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i didnât literally read through my entire blog again but iâm still pretty confident that this is still the best post I have written.
aesthetic
standing in a cramped bathroom wearing wool socks, underwear, and an unbuttoned collared shirt, hands on hips, whispering âmaybe i do have topological intuitionâ
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There is almost nothing left to discover in geometry.
Descartes, March 26, 1619
#damn i can't believe i missed international fuck rene descartes day#nothing i was doing that day was as important as hating rene descartes#*checks journal*#ahhh i had a good phone call with my prof friend#okay fine one thing#why yes i am scrolling through old posts don't ask questions no it's not past midnight
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i call this one "nobody likes you when youre 23"
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my profsâ advice/comments on impostor syndrome â
âiâll tell you how iâve learned to deal with this sort of thing. i didnât develop a sense of joy in my academic study until i realized that what really matters is the work itself. itâs not about trying to impress anybody or trying to earn a specific grade. itâs all about loving the work, the reading, the writing, the critical conversation. and i think you do love those things, and you do enjoy your academic work when you can get out of your own way about it. now, where iâm at in my career, i have to think about what gets me up in the morning, and thatâs not publishing 20 articles a year or seeking external approval. what it is, is writing, reading, and teaching about what I love, my own little academic world that iâve created.â â prof c
 âi wrote shitty papers in college, and i still got a phd. youâre not supposed to know everything yet! youâre still learning! you know what, write that on a post-it and stick it on your laptop. you donât have to know it all yet. you donât have to be perfect.â â prof s
âwhile i can assure you that you should not feel like an imposter, i can also confess that the syndrome is common at all levels of academia â so you should not think yourself abnormal to be experiencing it.â (x)
âi hate to say/write this, but itâs sort of true: that you having these impostor-syndrome reactions, these worries about disappointing those you respect ⌠to me, that sort of signals that you do have traits common to many successful academics! even people who have masses of success behind them â and, come to think of it, particularly the people who have a lot of cred *and* outside affirmation of it â suffer from impostor syndrome *if* (and the if is important) they genuinely care about the quality of their work. so: if itâs possible to think of these feelings as symptomatic of a characteristic many good academics share, then please do.                                              (âŚ) the important thing is this: how counterproductive it can be for self-sabotaging people to think of themselves as being âbornâ to do something. it makes any possibility of missing the mark immediately existential. academic work is something one chooses because one has a strong interest in a certain field of study, an ability to study and produce credible work (as judged by âauthoritiesâ in said field), and a social possibility to choose to proceed in that direction. sometimes, i, at least, find it helpful to remind myself of the simple facts of this.            (âŚ) i do think itâs important to put the activating gesture of entering grad school very firmly in your own hands. you are choosing this. you are choosing it because you want it, others have said that you are capable, and you have the practical possibility of choosing it. this is enough. the work will be enough without the existential heft, and the existential heft will not make the work better.â â s
 from my lit teacherâs wife, an english prof at ucb who graduated from yale â âyesâi feel like this oftenâand so does every person iâm close to in academia, and every graduate student ever. the key is to just feel the fear and do it anyway, especially when âdo itâ means âwrite.ââÂ
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Iâve been reframing thoughts from âthey could do it, but I canât because Iâm not good enoughâ to âthey could do it and so can I because weâre both humans just trying our bestâ, or from âI canât show up unless Iâm perfectâ to âI donât have to be perfect, I just have to show upâ, or from âthe future is hopelessâ to âthere is hope even if I canât see itâ, or from âI will always feel this badâ to âeverything is temporaryâ, or from âit is taking too much time to get betterâ to âit took time to get sick, it will take some time and patience to get betterâ.
But that reframing takes time too. It takes effort. It takes doing little things to make yourself feel better even when at first doing those things seems silly. Sometimes, you will fall off track, but you will get back up on your progress after resting as much as you need. Remember that this is about progression and not perfection. Remember it takes time, it takes a lot of trying, grieving, self-acceptance and self-forgiveness, but it is worth it, because little by little, you start to change, you start to get better. Donât hold yourself to the highest of standards in your recovery, please keep in mind that you deserve to enjoy life, that you deserve to heal, that you deserve this progress, even if youâre not doing it perfectly, even if it seems slow, even if at first it feels hard to believe that you deserve good things. You donât have to earn your healing by being perfect at it. Take your time. Rest if you must. But keep going, youâre doing great just by trying.
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Reposting this because I need to materialize it somewhere.
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hey guys i have a nemesis now
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