David Bessis

Book Tour: World Enough and Time Phil Christman reviews Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation by George Musser, Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity by David Bessis, Fully Alive by Elizabeth Oldfield, and Making Ti...

“We seek numbness, avoidance of pain, oblivion...I wake up every day aiming at Christianity, and often can’t even land on Epicureanism.”

@philipchristman.bsky.social sums up our times in his amazing @plough.bsky.social Book Tour Reviews:

www.plough.com/en/topics/cu...

Why genes can't explain genius The mathematical structure of cognitive inequality

Why you can't fit Terry Tao on a bell curve, and why genius is too extreme for genetics:
davidbessis.substack.com/p/why-genes-...

Paperback is in! — a cryptographic giveaway Win a signed copy of Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity

If you're curious about absurdly over-engineered protocols for drawing winners of public giveaways — or if you just want a free copy of my book — take a look at my new long form post.
davidbessis.substack.com/p/paperback-...

The magic of mathematical intuition Why the math you do understand feels stupidly easy

"Successful math becomes so intuitive that it no longer feels like math." New long form post...
davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-magic-...

You overestimate me :)

@truerphilosophy.bsky.social: for what it's worth, your post is getting massively more views and likes on another site ;)

Turing's high school teacher (from B. Jack Copeland's biography of Turing). More evidence for @davidbessis.bsky.social's hypothesis: great mathematicians got great by continuously reconstructing everything they were taught, for themselves. This is why Turing invented "the Turing machine" at age 23.

"I am struggling to think who would want to read this book" The reader report that could have killed my book, and proved it right

"I am struggling to think who would want to read this book"
—new long form post!
davidbessis.substack.com/p/i-am-strug...

Having fought and overcome the twin demons of anxiety and depression, there is nothing any fascist could do to scare me.

For some reason, my first long form post is suddenly getting viral: it received 2x more views in the past 30 days than in the first 3 months.
davidbessis.substack.com/p/weve-been-...

Here it is finally: Our mathematical methods book for life scientists! Aimed at advanced undergrads and beginning grad students, plus all those who want a deeper look at the math behind quantitative biology. @portugueslab.bsky.social.
1/3

The real mathematics is the one that we dream The ancient taboo at the heart of rationality

"With the possible exception of a few lost tribes somewhere in the Amazon or Andaman Islands, career mathematicians are the last true animists in this world."
From my new long form post: davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-real-m...

I am delighted to announce that Mathematica has received Ukrainian 🍾 and Korean 🍾 translation offers, adding to the long list of international editions:
French, Japanese, Italian, English, Russian, plus Greek 🍾, Chinese 🍾 and Turkish🍾 that are due soon.
A total of 10 languages!

Beauty.

There's absolutely a case for a "formalization" of math research output. It is will happen. The process has started with Lean and is unstoppable, because the community *needs* it.

[Says the guy who submitted a 100 paper that took 7 years to review and get accepted by the Annals of Mathematics.]

So:
- concrete foundations for formal math
- sand and mud foundations for intuitive math
- no reason to do formal math if it wasn't for its "meaning"
=> math only exists because meaningless formalism ENHANCES our ability to build semantics
=> this is the true motivation of my conceptualist take

So:
- concrete foundations for formal math
- sand and mud foundations for intuitive math
- no reason to do formal math if it wasn't for its "meaning"
=> math only exists because meaningless formalism ENHANCES our ability to build semantics
=> this is the true motivation of my conceptualist take

My next substack post should be on why logical formalism can't account for the "semantic" aspect of math, which is the key issue at stake here. The practical semantics of math comes from human cognition, not formalism itself.

... which is mostly true, in the sense that, with Lean, there will eventually be a convergence.
So, in a way, the "official language of mathematics" might be something like Lean.

Note that, in fact, no math paper is truly written in that language. Real-life mathematical writing blends formal notation with plain-language reasoning and casual remarks such as "it's obvious that", etc.
But mathematicians "imagine" that there is a fixed, well-defined axiomatic basis for this...

It's of course a casual remark. There's no precise definition, but I'm alluding the traditional "à la Euclid" axiomatic presentation of math, and its modern incarnation "à la Principia Mathematica", eg the (mythical) foundation of math in ZFC.

The fascinating final words of Bouchard's 1990 Science paper on IQ & twins reared apart.
While the paper is methodologically unsound — and its results aren't to be trusted — I actually enjoy the boldness of their conclusion.
Make no mistake, the stakes are super high!

❤️❤️❤️

Philosophers: logic is the foundation of mathematics.

Mathematicians:

This was phenomenal.

There is also a wonderful critique of Kahneman's System 1 and System 2 theory; Bessis proposes that it is missing System 3, a way of mediating or meditating between 1 and 2.

Beyond nature and nurture How mathematics changed my view on talent

Beyond nature and nurture: How mathematics changed my view on talent

davidbessis.substack.com/p/beyond-nat...

"While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen [...] a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind."
— Srinivasa Ramanujan

We've been wrong about math for 2300 years A radical conceptualist take on the foundations of mathematics

This reframing won't happen unless high-brow academics initiate it — because math is too intimidating for other people (including math teachers) to feel entitled to reframe it.
This is why I'll keep on exposing & promoting the latent epistemology of my book.
davidbessis.substack.com/p/weve-been-...

We've been wrong about math for 2300 years A radical conceptualist take on the foundations of mathematics

This reframing won't happen unless high-brow academics initiate it — because math is too intimidating for other people (including math teachers) to feel entitled to reframe it.
This is why I'll keep on exposing & promoting the latent epistemology of my book.
davidbessis.substack.com/p/weve-been-...

What's still missing — which my book aims to trigger, but this is a long shot — is a reframing of what people associate with the notion of math. At least people who're too inhibited to dance (I'm one of them) have a clear idea of what dance is about.