Dima Pasechnik 🇺🇦 🇳🇱

https://mathoverflow.net/users/11100/dima-pasechnik

USSR->Australia (Perth)->Netherlands->Germany->Netherlands->Singapore->Oxford (UK)->Evanston, Illinois (USA)

Lecturer at CS Department, mathematician interested in "computer algebra".

My Erdős number is 2 in two different ways, via Lex Schrijver, and via Michel Deza.

Public Key

npub1ccsatp4j3q6ajf3z3xcqe34ale74g4jaszrlfkqkp523kgu3n9usf9rjyc

NIP-05 Address

dimpase@mathstodon-xyz.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsvvgw4s6egsdweyc3gnvqvc67lul252ewcppl5mqtq69gmywgej7gpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dswejluq

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1ccsatp4j3q6ajf3z3xcqe34ale74g4jaszrlfkqkp523kgu3n9usf9rjyc

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Last Notes

2026-08-23 19:06:02 UTC

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@nprofile…mx8a NetBSD used to have a somewhat deficient software stack, at least as long as various computer algebra projects are concerned.
It did include a sub-standard libc, no fortran to speak about, etc.
OTOH FreeBSD and its clones are fine, OpenBSD is more or less OK (but their support for multithreading isn't great), etc.
Support for video stuff might be lacking (you want to get the best from your monitor and video card, obviously).

2026-06-14 21:51:24 UTC

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@nprofile…u76z @nprofile…x373 why is it mounted so insanely high? Move it down as low as the wheel allows.
Trust me on this, I am a naturalized Dutch (and have cycling mileage in the range of 100000 miles - that's what not driving does to you...)

2026-06-14 18:28:56 UTC

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@nprofile…u76z you'd have tried germs our kid brings from school. Makes me want to isolate at home... Maybe it's the way nature tells me that getting kids after turning 45 is not a good idea 😞

2026-02-09 06:23:14 UTC

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@nprofile…u3x7 pre-compiled tables are rather common in implementations of numerical methods, such as e.g. computing the Г - function. It's remarkable that it's essentially the same trick helps in formal proofs.

2026-02-04 23:40:50 UTC

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@nprofile…t6k2 people unloading on their fellow road users, and then behave as if it's fine?

2026-01-28 02:19:48 UTC

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@nprofile…4hp5 Expect a defamation lawsuit demanding a gazillion billion $$$ from every Brit who didn't buy a ticket ..

2026-01-28 02:03:54 UTC

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@nprofile…g0zc mind you, as far as wireless speakers/music go, there is Brennan, product designed by 1 person.
And it works. There is Sonos, also not from a company sitting on a warehouse of cash, and it works (although not as good as Brennan, thanks to all that DRM shit they have to deal with, and also adding their own walled garden...)
Airplay is a walled garden dealing with a shitload of DRM. No wonder it's crap.

2026-01-15 23:50:43 UTC

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@nprofile…dqcl Jan was een vrolijke soldaat...
https://youtu.be/bnq8VP2IvkQ?si=SmE3toSDZxzMOb12

2026-01-14 23:07:21 UTC

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@nprofile…t6k2 1979 or 1980

2026-01-14 23:03:29 UTC

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@nprofile…t6k2 I can...

2025-12-20 17:01:34 UTC

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@nprofile…mk8f @nprofile…ygg9 theory CS in USSR was arguably very strong. Computability results and logic, efficient algorithms results, Kolmogorov complexity, NP-completeness (Kolmogorov was an advisor of L.Levin, of Cook-Levin Theorem), Razborov's early work ...

2025-12-20 12:13:39 UTC

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@nprofile…mel7 a person with a Persian name repeating stupid Putin's propaganda, to me, with an aunt in Kharkiv, and a sister and Jerusalem. You should rather apologise, for Iran has Ukrainian and Jewish blood on its hands.

2025-12-20 02:48:58 UTC

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@nprofile…mel7 @nprofile…d76m funny you posting here, from position of Putin's murderous allies. Do you see Ukrainian blood on your hands?

2025-12-20 02:45:18 UTC

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@nprofile…mel7 Farhad - "from the river to the sea", right? Funny you posting here about nazis ...

2025-12-05 15:10:24 UTC

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@nprofile…w47d by providing data for a public git repo, one does not violate anything, it's akin to willingly publishing said info on a webpage. It's of course another story if the repo was not public, but then gets public, e.g. by open-sourcing the code in question.

2025-12-05 15:00:23 UTC

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@nprofile…w47d isn't Signed-off-by more about copyright ©️ ownership and, often, but not always, cryptographic signing of commits, than anything else? I also have hard time understanding how it's relevant to GDPR - it is about "work", not "private matters".

2025-12-04 05:37:23 UTC

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@nprofile…9f6k @nprofile…p3nn Tokyo is a pleasure to cycle in, though.

2025-11-15 22:07:06 UTC

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@nprofile…rrqe @nprofile…ztfm I still vividly recall how Talia Ringer was booted out of that other instance :[

2025-11-15 21:11:50 UTC

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@nprofile…rrqe re funding for forester - you might consider applying for GSoC (google summer of code). It would essentially provide (if successful) 2-4 person-month funding for 2 undergrad or postgrad students, typically remote. There is also a similar Google Summer of docs - (actually, longer, but specifically aimed at writing documentation).
Disclaimer: yes, Google isn't something one willingly wants to deal with, but this particular program is rather detached from their politics of late. And the application process is low effort.

2025-11-10 00:16:18 UTC

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@nprofile…stct @nprofile…vfam @nprofile…ysc7 did you say "teabag"? Oh dear... Teabags are akin to sex using a condom, pardon my analogy :] They restrict water flow to tealeaves.
Anyway, UK kettles are mostly crap just as well. We dumped a new Breville because it wasn't possible to get rid of chemical smell/taste of the water it boiled. And fully stainless steel builds were getting their base connectors dead pretty soon, often in less than half a year. It's not easy to make electronics which survive being heated to 100 degrees Celsius 5-7 times a day, 365 days a week.
Here (after seeing yet another stainless steel build roasting whatever electronic/electric componets it had, in 3 months or so) we settled on a Bodum gooseneck kettle - not fast, and smallish, but at least it's fully metal inside, and the connector appears to hold just fine.

2025-11-04 12:42:02 UTC

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@nprofile…8eua @nprofile…ztfm @nprofile…n7dy @nprofile…ral2 can you point out similar examples where it was done in the groupoid way?

2025-11-04 05:03:15 UTC

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@nprofile…ztfm @nprofile…8eua @nprofile…n7dy @nprofile…ral2 yep. My PhD was closely related to this s - although I was more into counting a bit more exotic objects, such as extended generalised quadrangles. Still have few incomplete tasks there. 30+ years ago I was better in this stuff than now 🙂
https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.15585

2025-11-04 00:09:55 UTC

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@nprofile…ztfm @nprofile…8eua @nprofile…n7dy @nprofile…ral2 it's typical in this area to be very combinatorial: they count enbeddings into PG(3,q), probaby the orbits under the action of GL(4,q).

2025-11-03 15:06:09 UTC

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@nprofile…ztfm @nprofile…n7dy @nprofile…ral2 51840=2|𝑃𝑆𝑈₄(𝔽)| - the group of symmetries of the abstract configuration of 27 lines and their triple intersections.
The square over (𝑞−5) comes from a counting of 6-point arcs in PG(2,𝑞) which are not on a conic; there is a some kind of a blow-up construction used to build cubic surfaces from 6 points on the projective plane. Nothing too mysterious, but, well...

2025-10-25 16:05:37 UTC

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@nprofile…pklh @nprofile…stct one can skip k, as b^k is interger for integer b and k 🙂

2025-10-25 16:02:45 UTC

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@nprofile…69ga @nprofile…8eua if you give a talk in English to a primary English speaking audience, shouldn't you make an effort to use right language idioms? Otherwise your point might be lost. Indeed, "sounds like Chinese to me" means "sounds like Greek to me" in a number of European languages - although not in (American) English.

2025-10-25 15:47:38 UTC

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@nprofile…8eua This physics work is from 2017 or so? I am aware of maths work done back in 2020/21, namely
https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.11747
and found the motivation behind the effort a bit lacking.
I just saw maths work
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12815
and as maths it looks interesting etc, but is it relevant to physics? I have no idea.

2025-10-14 21:19:53 UTC

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@nprofile…ygg9 @nprofile…00p2 are you aware of lfortran - https://github.com/lfortran/lfortran ?

2025-10-03 02:09:11 UTC

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@nprofile…hszg @nprofile…6al5 it's just matter of training - if you don't need to read others' code, you won't learn how to do it. Natural languages are the same in this sense (for me at least).

2025-06-18 04:37:00 UTC

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@nprofile…m2ru @nprofile…jc0y @nprofile…54aa I gather it depends on what "learn" means. Many countries in Europe were and are multilingual, e.g. Switzerland and Belgium. In the Flemish part of Belgium most everyone would have working or near-working knowledge of 3 or more languages: Dutch, French, English, maybe German.
And perhaps a bit of Latin and Greek, or Italian and Spanish pickled up at school.
Nothing to do with upper class.

2025-06-17 20:51:35 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 @nprofile…p3dv my early 80ies undergrad assignments were on punchcards, and started with some JCL magic, like JOB card, EXEC card, etc ...
Then these became files on harddisk, edited in a terminal, but JCL was still there.
https://www.mainframestechhelp.com/tutorials/jcl/coding-sheet.htm

2025-06-12 16:40:36 UTC

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@nprofile…hszg meanwhile Apple is turning Intel Macs into e-waste - this release is the last to support them.

2025-06-08 18:14:05 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 today military planners look at the war in Ukraine and see that one needs a lot (millions of items per year) of relatively cheap weapons: drones most of all - and anti-drones. Missiles from $30M a piece (or even $1M a piece) don't cut in a prolonged conventional weapons war.

2025-06-05 13:53:22 UTC

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@nprofile…nalw elm ?
https://elm-lang.org/ - it is certainly what gives you a nice UI, and students should be able to understand the code. Whether it's good enough to implement a proof assistant, I don't know.

2025-06-05 05:45:30 UTC

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@nprofile…cvwk @nprofile…j6um I don't think that e.g. mathematicians read megacorp journals much - they rather read arXiV preprints.
It's the bean counters who want these journal papers.

2025-06-03 17:28:06 UTC

Generic rings in FLINT - Inria - Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique https://inria.hal.science/hal-05094763v1

2025-06-01 02:41:51 UTC

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@nprofile…m2ru @nprofile…59k6 @nprofile…eqmp if you are already under screen, via ssh, ^Z might lead you astray...

2025-06-01 02:38:48 UTC

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@nprofile…m2ru @nprofile…59k6 @nprofile…eqmp
just type ":shell" and "sudo killall daemons". Then ^d and keep working.

2025-06-01 02:17:44 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 @nprofile…eqmp @nprofile…m2ru surely you'll prevail any daemon in vi terminal combat, even if it's just an xterm...

2025-05-31 21:17:17 UTC

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@nprofile…eqmp @nprofile…m2ru @nprofile…59k6 sometimes is suffices to scream VI! VI!

2025-05-29 05:46:05 UTC

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@nprofile…qmju @nprofile…rrr0 the particular private company in question has a very bad track record in its interactions with various common goods, e.g. USENET, email standards, etc. (leave alone it just being a big bad monopoly).
Can it be trusted?

2025-05-24 17:10:24 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 @nprofile…sszg That's interesting - while I am happy with hosting of pasechnik.info at @nprofile…h2u5 , they don't do domains, and looks like @nprofile…sszg might be an option for the latter

2025-05-23 03:15:30 UTC

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@nprofile…m2ru @nprofile…59k6 apart from a different form of "be", it's basically Dutch: "zo moet het zijn"

2025-05-21 20:11:47 UTC

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@nprofile…q5wq this is unsustainable. Enshittification has reached the final stages - e.g. in our department we see that PDFs sent from Windows (sic!) machines to our printers often end up as hanging jobs; these sent from macOS or Linux devices go through normally.

2025-05-21 19:11:00 UTC

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@nprofile…q5wq ok, so you don't USE Word to write texts, you use it to preprocess texts written by other means, right, because anti-monopoly laws are not enforced in this country, and as result M$ holds the bookprinting (or e-printing) hostage?

2025-05-21 18:26:54 UTC

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@nprofile…q5wq Libre Office produces quite good Word files (Googl Docs too). Surely Micro$oft constantly fucks with their fonts to be less compatible, but other than that it's not a big deal. As a tool to write stuff, Word is pretty awful.

2025-05-21 15:02:03 UTC

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@nprofile…q5wq soon: "hey Clippy, write me a page on murderous geeks in style of M.Lucas". And then they will sue you for plagiarism, cause they publish ahead of you obviously...
De Gruyter is a scientific publisher who seems to have standartised all they publish on a Word template, with an Indian (obv) company re-setting everything submitted to their journals in their crappy style. Butchering all the fine maths LaTeX typesetting along the way. I have a paper accepted to one of their journals, written in LaTeX, obviously, with their APCs paid by my former employer. I got galley proofs that were so ugly that I said no, I cannot approve it. Need to decide what to do with it now.

2025-05-21 14:48:28 UTC

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@nprofile…e5g0 In combinatorics it's quite standard.

2025-05-10 05:26:58 UTC

Travelling to a Kyoto RIMS conference, with an 8h layover in Taipei. (saving grant money by flying non-direct flight).
Where is the best stinky tofu in town?

2025-05-09 03:43:45 UTC

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@nprofile…jc0y @nprofile…m2ru Latvia wasn't a satellite - it was occupied by the USSR as a part of Molotov-Ribentropp pact in 1939 (and a good chunk of Poland, which became Lithuania and Belorussia).
As far as proper former USSR satellites go, Hungary is an outlier - it's a real authoritarian state nowadays (however they always seem to manage to choose the wrong side...). The rest are in various shapes; former Yugoslavia is a separate story of course, a smaller version of xUSSR - Serbia is a mess, and is seeding disorder among neighbours, in particular Bosnia, Kosovo via ethnic Serbian minorities (cf Russian minorities in Russia's neighbours).
Poland managed to rid itself of a right-wing cabal recently. Slovakia is tempted to go Hungary's way. Bulgaria seems to manage. Romania is about to hold a crucial presidential elections. Czechs are OK.

2025-05-08 20:17:19 UTC

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@nprofile…hszg @nprofile…6kk0 in Singapore we had a freshly graduated faculty member who, gradually, shaved his head, got various Buddhist paraphernalia in the office, then disappeared, We were told he joined a Buddhist monastery. Who knows who will be the next Dalai Lama....

2025-04-17 23:08:02 UTC

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@nprofile…m2ru @nprofile…jc0y @nprofile…l9v9 when about 10 years ago we asked Mathematics Institute of Oxford U. for a very modest IT funding to run a Python-based comp. maths undergrad course for maths majors, we were told: all the money went to the Matlab campus license, go away...
Matlab cabal was very strong there.

2025-04-16 04:22:35 UTC

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@nprofile…08ze the current government is wiping their feet with the constitution. E.g. how many court rulings have they already ignored? Only truly brainwashed don't see it, and that's why I called you brainwashed.
One thing they won't solve for sure, it's the problem of bringing Chicago homicide rate down. Because they don't care about these black people, just like you apparently don't.
To the contrary, it's in their political interests to incite racial hatred, just as they do with fanning xenophobia.
That's a standard fascist way, the way of Hitler, Putin, Orban. Yes, your fellow citizens are making fascist political decisions. You seem to approve of it.

2025-04-16 04:00:52 UTC

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@nprofile…08ze you don't understand why they are where they are now. If you don't try, you won't understand the problem. And the only way to understand them is to make a thought experiment I propose.
Otherwise, I'll have to block you as an KKK-style racist.

2025-04-16 03:55:20 UTC

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@nprofile…08ze
I speak as a university professor, sorry. I am not a politician. It's for politicians to find ways out. I can also point at particular events in US history which led it where it is now, if it helps.
I don't fly an Australian flag. The Blue-Yellow is the Ukrainian flag 🙂
But Dutch is my only citizenship. The Netherlands does not allow double citizenships when you naturalise on the basis of residency.
By the way, stop taking stand as an American exceptionalist, it's so weak. If you, unlike the present US government, are true to US Constitution, please recall the 1st amendment, and don't try to shut me up because I am not an American.

2025-04-16 03:43:42 UTC

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@nprofile…08ze I am not shaming you by pointing at these who struggle. I am saying - get into their, black, skin, then you might understand your own moral failure (of compassion).

2025-04-16 03:23:51 UTC

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@nprofile…08ze
Homicide rates in Chicago in 1930s were only slightly lower than now, and surely mostly whites (gangsters, you know, Italians, Jews - recent arrivals from Europe) were shooting each other.
Then the underground economics shifted, recent arrivals from Europe, who were gangsters, moved on (having the white skin helps a lot). Now gangsters are black, so you see what you see.
The problem is that in this deeply racist country, which is desegregated mostly on paper, black gangsters will stay gangsters as long as no drastic, and unrealistic, steps (ban on gun ownership, real desegregation, universal basic income, better education) happen.
Skin colour is a mark which is impossible to escape.
Do a thought experiment. Imagine you are a black boy growing up in Chicago's Garfield Park, or some other ghetto. Think about your chances. Think how to get out. Your school there is total shit, where you cannot learn a thing. You might end up drowning yourself in the lake, so hopeless it is there.
Importantly, a boy. In a black, male-dominated gang-dominated environment. It's not for nothing that the enrollment figures of black students in universities are so crazily skewed toward females, it's like 70% girls vs 30% boys.

2025-04-16 02:40:00 UTC

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@nprofile…08ze you don't have to be wealthy yourself - but surely you are brainwashed by the USA's wealthy.
My country of citizenship, NL, is considerably poorer compared to US, but it does not have homeless citizens living aboard subway trains, something I regularly see in Chicago.
You know, GINI index 25, as opposed to US' 41.

2025-04-16 01:49:37 UTC

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@nprofile…08ze @nprofile…fa4k I can tell you that only in this rather wealthy country I see so much hatred and disdain towards economically disadvantaged. Stop treating other human beings as shit. Skin colour does not matter. What matters is that you, 4oh-llc, worship money, and only money.

2025-04-14 01:23:45 UTC

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@nprofile…q5wq I am sorry. 30+ years of self-training in internet trolling instantly put together "Keep on whining... Whining, whining..." 🙂
PS. I have ordered your books, including the latest one

2025-04-14 00:49:03 UTC

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@nprofile…q5wq If Jim Morrison was on Kickstarter, he'd have used this an the opening line of LA Woman.

2025-04-13 21:27:28 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k hmm, there are algebraic integers with norm as close to 1 as you wish, e.g. a positive real root of $x^n-2=0$ goes to 1 as $n\to\infty$ right? Lehmer number has minimal norm in a much subtler settings,

2025-04-09 14:13:55 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 Y.Matiyasevich (a Fields medalist) had arXiv submissions on computational experiments with Riemann $\zeta$-function stopped by a moderator about 15 years ago. I don't recall what the reason was, but these were quite meaningful preprints.
OTOH I once had a moderator who had my preprint briefly on hold, as he noticed an embarrassing error. As a result, I improved the paper quite a lot, solving an long-standing problem along the way 🙂

2025-04-09 03:23:36 UTC

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@nprofile…m2ru @nprofile…jc0y oh well. Certainly most Russian Empire nobility of his level were serf owners.
And like many "liberals" of his time, while being unhappy with oppressive regime (some of his friends took part in 1825 uprising, which also put him on a black list, he still was a fierse Russian imperialist, as one can easily see from his texts)

2025-04-09 03:14:29 UTC

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@nprofile…m2ru @nprofile…jc0y Pushkin? He was an entitled brat, who owned serfs and slept with his serf girls, for fun. He wrote a lot of praise for the genocidal Empire, and bastardised Russian language...

2025-04-09 03:06:19 UTC

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@nprofile…m2ru @nprofile…jc0y not only English (as 2nd language, taught e.g. using truly riveting UK Communist Party newspaper Morning Star), but also History of CPSU, Political Economy, and Scientific Communism. And the military training, to get an officer rank at graduation time (I bailed out from the latter on medical grounds, thanks goodness).

2025-04-08 22:03:12 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 @nprofile…6al5 @nprofile…hszg @nprofile…l9jz
well, I am all open. The busy guy never got back to me, though. Sadly, it feels a bit like
https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/

2025-04-08 21:22:57 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 @nprofile…hszg @nprofile…l9jz
I'm not at all a quick study these years, but the book by Pitts got me lost pretty fast - while I actually did publish on infinite permutation groups in my PhD years. If it is a simple model it's very well obscured. And the book spends dozens of pages on stuff from a group theory textbook - in non-standard notation and terminology.
Maths works best when connections to the existing body of knowledge are made, not when one starts to derive well-known stuff from basic principles, in wildly different terminology, etc.

2025-04-08 20:52:34 UTC

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@nprofile…hszg @nprofile…6kk0 @nprofile…l9jz while working in Oxford, I noticed that there are topics which are claimed to be CS by people working at CS departments who enjoy CS-isation of maths. They take up a maths problem, cloak it into terminology and notation not used in this maths area, and march on churning out papers and books which go unnoticed by maths people, cause it's entirely under their radar.
(It could be that I, as usual, sound too harsh, but there is certainly quite a bit of this in the theory of nominal sets, for instance). I examined a CS MSc thesis on the topic once; then I send to the (very busy) thesis supervisor an email, like this:
"following our conversation regarding the MSc
thesis, I went and browsed a bit the book Nominal Sets by Pitts.
(I must say I didn't manage to get very far there).
I found it striking how little permutation group theory is used there, even though
there are easy reformulations of fundamental concepts. For instance,
any nominal set comes from the permutation action of the finitary group
$G=Sym(\infty)$ (called $Perm \mathbb{A}$ in the book),
with each orbit having the point stabilizer $H$, with $A$
a finite subset of the domain of $G$, and $H$ contained in the setwise
stabilser $G_{\{A\}}<G$ of $A$, and containing the pointwise stabiliser $G_A$ of $A$.
I.e. $G_{\{A\}}\geq H\geq G_A$.
(And for strong nominal sets $H=G_A$ ).
All this immediately suggests that e.g. the natural $G$-invariant binary relations
associated with the nominal set in question are somehow "easy" to
understand.
[etc]"

2025-04-01 05:41:26 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 I was sure these names were emitted by a tool 🙂

2025-03-31 21:39:22 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 I played with it a bit, but I found the naming issue rather underdefined and underdocumented. As if there is a tool which chooses names for you, undocumented.

2025-03-31 20:48:22 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 I am curious to see a proper Forester workflow. I can't see how one can create and deal with that many seemingly arbitrarily named files.

2025-03-30 23:48:45 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 no, there is a lot of history, personal, too, here which makes it easier for me to understand the issue, and to judge whether this promise you mention is any good.
Have you personally experienced racism?
I've been experiencing racism back in USSR, where, as you might know, the famous 5th Paragraph, Ethnicity, was present in internal passports (these were essential documents for all things from employment to housing). 5th paragraph was a big deal - the safest was to have Russian there. But it wasn't choice, you could only choose between 5th para of your parents. There cases where it was advantageous to have a different one, though - e.g. in a different from RFSR Soviet Republic it could have been better for career etc prospects to have a 5th paragraph of the Republic.
And then there a saying: "they hit on the mug, not on the passport" - which was how a differently, from the majority of the place, looking person would be often received. So one saw a lot of everyday racism too, one which was not dependent on the 5th paragraph's contents.

2025-03-30 22:07:25 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 I disagree with a point of view that a race-based system, such as HBCU, can be a source of pride going forward. I've seen too much of it back in USSR.

2025-03-30 21:56:14 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 perhaps the 1st point to discuss here is the very existence of HBCU. It's 21st century, and supposedly 1st world country has this kind of stuff, essentially college/university ghettos.
2nd point - the utter failure of the school system.
Mind you, we just spent a break in Memphis, one of few places reachable from Chicago by train. Population of Memphis is 63% Black, 25% White.
Memphis has a number of colleges, among them a selective, private, expensive place, called Rhodes College. No, a different Rhodes. Still, in the past they were importing academics from Oxfbridge - to run tutorials. Their campus is fenced, one can't get in for a walk around, despite being in a safe, posh, neighbourhood.
We don't drive, we took buses (too infrequent and far apart to always be useful), we took Ubers, we took Lyfts. The closest bus stop to our Airbnb was close to blood/plasma collection centre. That's a popular way to get money among mostly males. The buses were also mostly taken by men - they mostly didn't look great, you know. Our Uber/Lyft drivers, 4 of them, were 50/50 female (all black) and male. We talked to one of the female drivers: college educated, former biology teacher, 2nd degree - MBA. She won't go work at school again, cause, as she put it, it's basically not teaching, it's behavior management. In high school too.
Race relations in USA is an ongoing tragedy of huge proportions. Wholesale criminalisation of Black males is a part of it. NYT, which failed to endorse a mixed race presidential candidate, has become a dirty rug.

2025-03-21 14:40:59 UTC

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@nprofile…udnc @nprofile…q5wq
FDR with his New Deal was the closest to a socialist figure amongst US presidents.
He did 11 years as the president, and was insanely popular.

2025-03-19 18:31:44 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 Apple funboyz, ready to wear a whole body wetsuit to use their fav devices... :P

2025-03-19 18:16:57 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k the committee included two, not one, higher ups in the Russian security services. This alone is a huge red flag, a throwback to the USSR times.
I should also correct myself - two of the three Fields medalists did respond, see more details here:
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12717

2025-03-19 17:07:52 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k that info isn't really helpful. It's more interesting how the things were in Jan 2022:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220128222229/https://icm2022.org/organization
I don't think the 2 Fields medalists on the committee ever said a word in public on the whole hoopla...

2025-03-19 16:13:56 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k the only advantage of looking back into history here is that it's harder to learn about the current examples: Russia, China, Turkey, etc. due to a lot of self-censoring bias.
Everyone still hopefully remembers the last ICM, the composition of its original organisation committee in St Petersburg, how the distinguished mathematicians there were silent, etc.

2025-03-19 00:59:12 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…hszg
let me quote from the preface by the translator:
"Mathematics is like vodka. Drink, and you may forget the oppressive world around you...."
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/114/186/383/903/998/934/original/e666345d77769641.png

2025-03-19 00:47:32 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…hszg you can certainly find texts on how it was to do science in USSR.
Your monographs or PhD theses were to cite classics of Marxism-Leninism, and if you were a "suspicious" ethnic minority, you'd have a lot of extra trouble (starting from being unable to enter the best undergrad programs - however USA isn't a stanger to this sort of discrimination: it discriminated Afro-Americans, Jews, Asians, although it often wasn't a centrally administered discrimination). Etc etc etc, I can write a lot more - on censorship, on The Party role, etc. Here is a text to give you some ideas.
See e.g. https://archive.org/details/itseemsiamjewsam0000frei

2025-03-17 01:59:40 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…yu7x it's a "combinatorial embedding", i.e. collection of distinguished cycles in the graph, so that every edge appears in exactly two of these cycles.
I am not sure how to pick up a basis for the homology group of the 2-holed donut (the join of 2 tori), which is isomorphic to $\mathbb{Z}^4$. It seems there is still something to specify - these is a number of topologically inequivalent ways each cycle can be embedded. The distinguished cycles are embedded in the contractible way, but you can't freely move them around the surface, as there are the remaining simple cycles.

2025-03-16 20:47:06 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k there should be an embedding of this graph into a genus 2 surface - can you see it? (I am told the genus of it by SageMath).

2025-03-16 17:57:37 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…den0 there was an outcry when these rules were changed, but it was only a part of the scandal. There was also a mass (tens of thousands) cancellation of student visas for these who were deemed to cheat on their visa-related English tests - something that didn't contribute to the perception of UK as a good destination for students.
I bet that US anno 2025 is much less attractive to students than in the Biden's years, but it might be a bit of a tough going for UK right now.

2025-03-14 04:46:26 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 surely you got your share of lead from petrol, and dust from coal-fired power stations, not to mention vehicles. I spent few weeks in London around 1995, air quality, after few years on the coast in Western Australia, wasn't impressive at all...

2025-03-14 03:39:52 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 have you grown up in a big UK city? The air in UK cities is awful, it can give you a lung desease IMHO. In Oxford I constantly had unhappy lungs and nose, and it is supposed to be clean and green. But it's a joke, it has a congested 10 or so lanes ring road, non-electrified stinking railroads, and congested by all that endless cars and buses inner roads, cars which I often overtook on my bicycle.

2025-03-14 03:25:56 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 I had my student visa to Australia delayed in 1992, as their embassy doctor did not believe I was not a smoker, by looking at the submitted X-rays, and so I had to redo them in a clinic designated by them. And, by the way, it's only in late 70s Moscow started to get a lot of personal cars, and railroads and metro and trolleybuses and trams were clean for obvious reasons. Just industry, you know.

2025-03-08 01:27:36 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k we'll be riding a night train to Memphis during the spring break - one of not too many such options from Chicago...

2025-03-05 05:39:38 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 one purely imaginary unit car, squared.

2025-02-26 04:27:35 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 this was on Biden's watch, I went to said office in early November 2024

2025-02-26 03:16:59 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 it's known that USians work longer hours compared to EU.
As to, hmm, efficiency, that's another story. Enough to look at the process of getting a card with the SSN - they type data in from printouts of pdf forms, and that how all the Social Security department appears to function. They made 2 typos in my given name in the process, I'm still waiting for a replacement card...

2025-02-15 19:24:34 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 qua a private computer/OS, you might consider Linux or an *BSD 🙂
I think Nvidia is working on flang, an llvm-based modern Fortran compiler, and it's meant to use GPU as much as possible.

2025-02-12 15:30:29 UTC

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@nprofile…q5wq that's networking for sysadmins, no?

2025-02-12 05:58:37 UTC

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@nprofile…q5wq as I said somewhere already please write a book on oauth2... 🙂

2025-02-07 07:39:08 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…m2ru I dealt with VFS last year, while trying to get new passports for my son and myself. Cause the Dutch govt in its infinite wisdom all but outsourced provision of passports to the residing abroad citizens to it. VFS is a true clusterfuck. We ended up getting our passports in the Netherlands instead.

2025-02-07 00:05:14 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 Oh dear. :-( Do you do PCR tests? At least early on in the COVID times, there were quite a few cases of, in particular, medical workers staying PCR-positive for months after being infected.

2025-02-06 23:39:34 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 if just one test is failing, and that's the only manifestation of your illness, I'd say it's the test which is the problem.
COVID testing companies got filthy rich with not very much quality control.

2025-02-06 15:26:07 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 hammer and sickle, too? These Cambridge commies, there is never a shortage :-)

2025-02-04 06:34:49 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 in early 1980s USSR churned through General Secretaries of the CPSU at a serious rate, too 🙂