Andrew Krause

OK my (very rare but at least N=2 examples) of 5 referees suggests that perhaps Applied Mathematics may be an outlier here... 2-3 are standard, though, with 1 very rarely as well.

Musk FRS.

Teaching a comp math course this year. I used fun examples to hammer this home. The partial sum of the harmonic series up to 10^9 is radically different in 32 vs 64 bit floating point (and of course, the series also converges in any finite floating point).
0.1+0.2=0.3 is not true in floating point.

Of course, I entirely agree the problems are not due to these particular individuals, but things like much of the Russell Group chasing small short-term gains by massively increasing student intake while worsening everything about the ecosystem.

I think anthropomorphizing/personalizing enemies is an old and rather common tactic that fits our psychology innately. Social media doesn't help, but I don't think it's the root cause. We like thinking of "Hitlers" as archetypal villains, without which our problems wouldn't exist.

Understanding is always epsilon>0 away.

Even as a white US citizen, my partner and I paid somewhere upwards of £15,000 in immigration fees and related costs to finally get ILR after 10 years in the country, plus many many other hoops to jump through.

The current moment is not a pleasant one...

The advert for the second (wetlab) postdoc is now live www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

How do cells navigate up gradients of adhesive proteins?
🤔

Termed "Haptotaxis", this effect is ubiquitous in cell migration, but it's mechanism was poorly understood

We show that passive friction directs cells & explains complex trajectories on gradients

👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Entirely agreed. In fact, out of an awareness of my own proclivity for laziness, I aim to minimize my own use as much as possible. Below are really the only personal uses I've made of it. I think the uses I've seen are enormously varied by person.

bsky.app/profile/blin...

Personally, I use them a tiny bit for certain aspects of coding/sometimes in very specific writing tasks. E.g. I had a paper written but wasn't satisfied with the title. I asked an LLM for 10 alternative titles. I didn't use any of them, but I did use these examples to refine the one I did use.

In my experience, it is very, very idiosyncratic. Some people use them to digest/understand concepts/papers; some people use them to speed up certain coding/tedious technical tasks; some people use them to generate text, but even that varies heavily.

🚨 Excited to introduce FuChi (Fucci chicken), the first avian cell cycle reporter line. Thank you to all those who contributed to putting this paper together. I really think it showcases the power and beauty of the chick embryo as a developmental biology model. 🐥 🥚 🔬 @roslininstitute.bsky.social

The tools we build become the questions we ask Why inclusive design is good for more than access—it expands the boundaries of discovery

"When we design tools that welcome different ways of sensing and thinking, we open new reaction pathways for discovery. Inclusive design doesn’t just widen participation; it expands the very structure-function relationship of science itself."

cen.acs.org/careers/dive...

Join us at SFU for a 2-year Mekler Postdoctoral Fellowship in mathematical biology to work with me and Ailene MacPherson. Apply at www.mathjobs.org/jobs/list/27... by Nov 15.

I wonder how many of the current members agree or disagree with the opening volley of The Dialectical Biologist:

"Scientists act within a social context and from a philosophical perspective that is inherently political. Whether they realize it or not, scientists always choose sides."

Well. The RS is clearly feeling the heat. They could have saved themselves the embarrassment months ago. How did they ever imagine this wasn't going to get even worse?

This is awful. I'm sorry that this is the timeline we are living in. I hope you are as OK as you can be through all this crap.

You may get a small bit of solace if you sesrch Bluesky for the name of the author of this "article."

I am nearsighted but things very close to my face are fine, even if small. But I've been increasingly using some device magnification in the last few years, which is constantly playing badly with awful UI design choices...

I suspect most people are not aware of the diversity in partial-sightedness.

The advert for the first of these positions (computational/mathematical synbio) is live!

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

I think we do use synthetic data in the form of outputs from models, either analytically or numerically. But the "quality" of such synthetic data is very different to statistical or AI-generated data, given that the models encode mechanistic hypotheses, which themselves can be tested.

As a diabetic, I have already lived over 25 years longer than if I had been born 70 years earlier.

Also this: bsky.app/profile/blin...

This is the light at the end of the tunnel Liam!

8.1.2 Romulus Wasn't Built In A Day (Bonus Post) In which two academics expand the boundaries of maths by expanding the boundaries of the Romulan Star Empire.Krause’s KraniumLet's start with an introduction. This post was co-written with Dr Andrew K...

IDFC has something special up for y'all: a post co-written with Dr Andrew Krause on the Newman-Sagan model of interstellar civilisation growth, and applying it to both Starfleet and the Romulan Star Empire before and immediately after first contact. Comes complete with interactive graphical model!

Turing’s theory of pattern formation Alan Turing’s theory of biological pattern formation, proposed in The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, is widely cited as a mechanism underlying a variety of periodic patterns throughout biology and c...

I'll have to miss this sadly, but it is one of my main research areas. You may be interested in these links:

visualpde.com/art-pdes/che...

visualpde.com/visual-stori...

📣 Delighted to announce the first edition of the 𝗪𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗕𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 Day, to take place in Oxford on 𝗙𝗿𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝗢𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝟭𝟳𝘁𝗵, with lots of exciting work at the interface of mathematics and biology.

🔗 For more information: sites.google.com/view/oxwmath...

Oof. Same on both accounts here...

This thread is probably very relevant to @danielcooney1.bsky.social and others in how we think about virtual engagement and value.

We're working on some exciting new features for VisualPDE, but we want to hear from you!

Whether you're a regular user or just tried it once, we'd love your feedback on how you use the tool. It’s a super short survey (promise)!

👇Fill it out here:
forms.office.com/Pages/Respon...

Complex behaviour is not limited to animals! Here we map the entire spectrum of waveforms dynamics on a quadriflagellate single cell with 4x 70um (!) #cilia, to a low dimensional behavioural manifold with surprising structure! #protistsonsky

All revealed in our new preprint doi.org/10.1101/2025...