I'm glad that I finally see someone else in math talking about what I described 3.5 years ago in my blog post Everything I need is on the ground. Saw the following passage in Kevin Buzzard's recent post on grief:
As a PhD student of Richard Taylor in the early 1990s, I quickly understood that the statement of the theorem which I would attempt to prove in my thesis relied on a construction of Deligne attaching Galois representations to modular forms. I suggested to Taylor that I first read Deligne’s proof before continuing, and he was quick to shoot down this idea, pointing out that my funding was for 3 years only and I simply did not have enough time to get on top of all of the relevant literature at this point in my career. I never did find the time to read Deligne’s construction, or the proof of the Langlands–Tunnell theorem which was crucial in Wiles’ work, or many of the other things which I needed in my thesis and subsequent work. So do I “understand” my own work? What exactly do we even mean by “human understanding of mathematics”?
This is in contrast to undergraduate (and olympiad) level math:
Of course we all know it means to understand undergraduate-level results; we have taught the courses and checked everything carefully. I am able to explain all of the undergraduate algebra courses which I have ever lectured, right down to the axioms of set theory and also right down to the axioms of type theory. I understand the material in a visceral way.
… Though if I'm being totally honest, there are still some gaps for me there. For example, I never did learn the proof of the eyelid claim used in IMO 2014/6; all I know is that it is not too difficult and it's written in the shortlist packet, but 12 years later I never got around to reading it.
Finally took the time to learn how to use bwrap for Claude Code
(see new box.sh in dotfiles).
It was actually easier than expected so now regretting not doing this before.
It finally dawned on me why camelCase is so-named. Took a while.
Woke up this morning to find that LAMV got a Chinese fan translation. Exciting!
Every time I hear people compare math with chess I die a little inside.
If only predicting the future was as easy as pointing to something vaguely-related and confidently asserting an analogy.
On a whim today I finally went and learned what the "Evan is Old" point is. Seems the name is five years old now?
Me: "Everyone's from South Dakota now".
Also me: StudentRegistration.objects.filter(country="USA").update(us_state="SD")
mfw when attempting to refactor my diary manages to trigger the OOM killer
Why I never get any work done:
ruff check passing locally but failing on GitHubI still feel a bit weird being described as an "educator" or "in education". Somehow it sounds too important. I'd rather just say I'm a teacher.
after refactoring my style file my diary no longer compiles and i kinda regret some of my life decisions
One of my few memories from elementary school
was writing a terminal game to play with myself in Python 2.
I didn't know time.sleep existed, so I had homebaked my own to the tune of
for _ in range(C * num_seconds):
passwith C worked out empirically. Back then I had two-space indents, and my editor was DrPython.
I kinda wish I could see the old programs just to laugh at it, but I don't know if I still have that ancient laptop.
It's kinda too bad RSA-260 is getting drowned out, so in case you haven't heard:
RSA-260 = 2211282552952966643528108525502623092761208950247001539441374831912882294140
2001986512729726569746599085900330031400051170742204560859276357953757185954
2988389587092292384910067030341246205457845664136645406842143612930176940208
46391065875914794251435144458199
RSA-260 = 4397328654844826923795068102505872571721883526553349659561256924505973939597
593482272505698004801207988043088656411102133523080581
× 5028695206842569864686141618253083416610081090075366674776775706538324961364
412200138116378509733307971876652984898985905923678379New handout: "Enough Python to solve $N = p^2+q^3$". Guest article by Andrew Lin meant for people working on the OTIS application.
https://web.evanchen.cc/handouts/C1Python/C1Python.pdf
Playing Ace Attorney Investigations. Edgeworth is such a good main character.
Few months later, the GitHub star history API is finally back. (And thus the Napkin chart is working again.)
Current and past otters can play OPAL 3 now, while the public teaser is published too. The full public edition comes out on September 14.
Labeled Trees is particularly cool and if you only look at one puzzle I think you should try that one.
So somehow my zombie wordpress blog accidentally fired off a draft of a post that never made it in my site migration onto my Facebook and LinkedIn (which gave everyone permission errors when they tried to open it). Whoops. At least now I realized that draft was missing?
I think one of life's greatest pleasures is watching the answer log in realtime on a puzzle hunt you're organizing.
(A lot of times, even from the wrong answers, you can see how far the solvers have gotten into the puzzle.)
https://blog.anserena.com is live now! featuring a comment and mailing-list backend written by yours truly 😉