Charlotte Aten

I'm a mathematician, and I like combinatorics, universal algebra, and category theory. I also write software, and I know that spreading technical literacy is critical to building a better world.

Homepage: https://aten.cool
PeerTube: https://videos.trom.tf/a/caten/video-channels
Pronouns: she/her

Public Key

npub126gtdmmz3nz5mdpkzuk54jhx6pnjvgxpnu8rjk3mfallmq8tghmsgg75xh

NIP-05 Address

caten_at_mathstodon.xyz@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs9dy9kaa3ge32dksmpwt22etndqeexyrqe7r3etga57llasr45tacpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsvv8h40

Publishing to

offchain.pub

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub126gtdmmz3nz5mdpkzuk54jhx6pnjvgxpnu8rjk3mfallmq8tghmsgg75xh

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Last Notes

2026-04-02 21:28:59 UTC

I am leaving the university system, possibly forever, at the end of this month. I will be living in the woods, studying mathematics and (hopefully) farming enough to survive. I have posted an essay explaining why I'm doing this on my website:
https://aten.cool/leaving_university_2026.html
#math #research #academia #USpol #mathematics #trans #transgender #farming #solarpunk #fascism #university

2026-01-16 03:11:47 UTC

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I guess I just can't bring myself to trust my communications to a system that was made by people who were investigated for spying on the US for Israel. I hope that I'm just being paranoid, but it can't hurt to be careful these days.

2026-01-16 03:05:11 UTC

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Idk, the standard could intentionally configure your communications in a way that is more easily monitored via some other pathway the attacker controls. There's also the issue of people relying on reference implementations that may have some less subtle designed flaw.

2026-01-16 02:54:00 UTC

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I have a bad impression of Matrix, both in terms of culture and pedigree (that Amdocs company sounds sketchy). There are people who say it's lacking technically, but I can't speak to this myself.

2026-01-15 23:13:28 UTC

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Why not WhatsApp -> #XMPP ?

2026-01-11 00:50:26 UTC

I received and rejected my first plenary talk invitation recently. It was for the 2026 BLAST conference in Waco, Texas. Since I am transgender, it doesn't seem wise to visit Texas for any length of time. I told the conference organizers as much, and that I am disinclined to go anywhere I'm a second-class citizen.
As you can see at https://math.colorado.edu/blast/ I was one of the organizers for last year's BLAST meeting in Boulder, Colorado. I knew that the next two meetings would be in Texas and Indiana and passed along the same concerns (not just about trans people, but about women's safety) which I had already expressed to my fellow organizers in 2025. I got a polite response, but it's still tough to keep missing the next steps in my career progression because of things like this.
#math #academia #research #logic #algebra #topology #Texas #Colorado #Indiana #trans #transgender #feminism

2025-11-20 18:43:44 UTC

Today I learned that the English word «thing» originally meant some kind of legal meeting, and my perspective on phrases like «Are you going to the thing?» is forever changed. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_(assembly) for more information.
#English #etymology #history #language

2025-10-16 02:08:46 UTC

I was reading the Wikipedia page on the Clovis culture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture) of ancient North America, as one does, when I came across a mention of the subsequent Folsom tradition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folsom_tradition). I'm used to streets in Boulder having Native American names like Arapaho, but I didn't realize that Folsom, which has our math department at the end of it, was such a street.
As you can read about at https://www.archaeologysouthwest.org/2015/02/23/george-mcjunkin-and-the-discovery-that-changed-american-archaeology/, Folsom is the name of a New Mexico town where the first evidence of these people was found. The discovery was made by a George McJunkin, who was quite the Western character. In addition to a name that sounds classically Western to my ear, McJunkin was a Black cowboy who was born into slavery in Texas but went on to become a rancher, archaeologist, and historian.
#Wikipedia #history #Colorado #NewMexico #Texas #archeology #BlackHistory #NativeAmerican #Boulder

2025-08-15 15:52:09 UTC

I keep hearing about people "distro hopping" from one Linux desktop distribution to the next. I never understood this. As a teenager in the 00s, I tried Fedora, but I wasn't ready for Linux (or maybe Linux wasn't ready for such casual users), so I dropped it quickly. I tried Ubuntu for like two seconds in my early 20s, hated the desktop environment, then used only Linux Mint for about the last decade. I recently switched to Linux Mint Debian Edition.
I like the clean feeling of a new install, but I have no desire to keep fiddling with my system and customizing everything over and over. It's tedious. I just want my computer to work. Am I the odd one out here?
#Linux #LinuxMint #Debian #LinuxMintDebianEdition #LinuxMintDE #LMDE #Fedora #DistroHopping #Ubuntu

2025-08-07 23:00:48 UTC

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I wonder if our neighbors over at #Palantir are turning off their computers...

2025-04-15 02:24:28 UTC

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I'm proud to see that my alma mater made the list.

2025-03-09 16:42:51 UTC

Why don't we write the logarithm like this? It feels like teaching students what logarithms are is way more painful than teaching roots, but this notation emphasizes that they are perfectly analogous.
I can provide my rough #TexLatex source for this if people are interested.
#math #teaching #notation
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/114/133/445/374/683/906/original/215ba98e8bef8688.png

2025-03-02 20:22:29 UTC

I've switched to lurking here for a while due to the effects the current political situation in the US is having on me. I am making some big changes to how I do things, including how I livestream and host various products of my math research. I'll be posting about the steps I take as I take them.
I have switched from #Firefox to #Librewolf on my desktops. This was pretty easy since I have been storing my bookmarks as a plain text file on my desktop for a while now. Very portable. I just wish #VideoDownloadHelper worked on Librewolf.
I am looking into #XMPP now and trying to find a server to sign up for. Does anyone know any with open registration?
I have also recently gotten into #IRC again, and am excited to get more familiar with the #Pidgin client on desktop.
#math #privacy #security #federation #software

2024-12-13 22:34:32 UTC

I updated my bio. I am still interested in machine learning, and I am continuing my own projects in this area, but this terminology has become synonymous with an ideology and culture to which I am diametrically opposed.
There is great value in tools like optical character recognition, speech recognition, and machine translation (when ethically applied). However, the current regime selling machine learning tools as products is completely disconnected from what I would view as a healthy and productive contribution to society.
I would still like to contribute to practical applications of mathematics in the world, and I hope that academia will continue to support my efforts to contribute in a way that supports everyone, not just a small cadre of plutocrats.
#MachineLearning #AI #math #ethics #research

2024-12-06 21:47:34 UTC

I'm on the mailing list for Spectra (https://lgbtmath.org/), a queer math organization, as well as their Outlist (https://lgbtmath.org/People.html). I'm not any more involved than that at the moment, but I'm now questioning my plans to help out more in the future.
This year, an election was held, the results of which are now nullified since it was apparently held a year ahead of schedule according to the bylaws. The situation appears acrimonious and I cannot yet determine whether leadership has acted in accordance with my own ethics.
The controversy appears to meld several extreme current political issues, and I am disappointed that it is not obvious where everyone stands. Sadly, connection to ethically dubious entities is part of being a mathematician in the US, and I hope that the first tax-exempt queer math organization is not one of them.
I might know more if I was on the organization's Discord, but given the mailing list discussion, I'm not sure if joining that platform with clarify things.
#queer #math #lgbt #academia

2024-12-04 17:26:54 UTC

I've been on a longer hiatus from livestreaming than I originally intended, but you can see me give a seminar talk this evening at the The New York City Category Theory Seminar:
https://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~noson/Seminar/index.html
I'll be talking about the invariant theory part of my thesis (https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18063) at 7PM, New York time. I'll discuss how I found that every (positive) property of finite structures can be checked by counting small* substructures.
*Terms and conditions may apply. Small is constrained by the logical complexity of a property and may not conform to mundane notions of smallness in bad cases.
#CategoryTheory #combinatorics #logic #Bourbaki #algebra #AbstractAlgebra

2024-11-23 22:16:28 UTC

Did you know that desktop Firefox hides the ability to set custom search engines from users? I finally got fed up with DuckDuckGo and decided to make the change. In order to do this, you need to:
1) Go to about:config in your address bar.
2) Search for browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh
3) Click the + symbol to the right to change this setting to "true".
4) Under "Search" in the settings menu you will now see that you have a new "Add" button.
5) Click that, and you will be able to include a custom url for searches.
To get this url, the easiest thing to do is make a search in the desired engine, copy the resulting url (maybe removing some garbage, if you know how) and then changing the search query to %s
(1/2)
#Firefox #search #SearchEngine #Mozilla #DuckDuckGo

2024-10-18 17:15:37 UTC

I've found a citation of my own work on Wikipedia for the first time!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commutative_magma
Naturally, I read this page before I wrote my rock-paper-scissors paper. It's neat to see that my own work is now the citation for something that was unsourced "original research" on Wikipedia.
#math #research #Wikipedia #algebra #games #RockPaperScissors #AbstractAlgebra #UniversalAlgebra #combinatorics #GameTheory

2024-09-19 04:00:43 UTC

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I've just accepted that my name will not be pronounced correctly most of the time. Kudos to you for not throwing in the towel yet.