Leon Rofagha

jeffrey E. <jeevacation@gmail.com> to Sep 19, 2015 8:23 AM star_border yau says you are the schools expert in category theory. true? . 2 . is there a topological equivalent to the power laws. ? 3 is there a geometric derivation that is coherent ? 4, re language, as martin may have told you i have been spending a great deal of time with Chomsky. i have been trying to formalize the concept of signals ( images etc ) that are coherent. . visual energy is first focused and then our vision system eventually recognizes -separates , real world images from noise. a form of a map? then arguably makes judgements based on similar ( distances from already existing maps etc ). images. , meaning etc. . skype or call might be helpful when and if you have time Jeffrey Epstein jeffrey E. <jeevacation@gmail.com> to Sep 19, 2015 11:43 AM star_border query , is gravity merely a pseudo force. like centripetal , created by the central limit theorem. so that it is a consequence of the probabililty distribution of matter in the universe . nothing more. . 2. in a truly random probability space. if an event occurs for the first time, does it increase the probability that it will happen again.

Michael Hopkins <Michael Hopkins> to jeffrey E. Sep 19, 2015 4:24 PM star_border He Jeffrey I think Jacob Lurie is more of an expert in category theory than I am, but I appreciate Yau's endorsement. I'm not sure I understand the questions in your first email. I'll have to ponder them. As for the others I'm not sure I know enough to think beyond the boiler plate answers. General Relativity tells us that gravity is an aspect of mass, so I wouldn't know how to think of it as a pseudo force. And "truly random" would be probably be taken to mean that the occurrence of an event does not increase the probability of it happening again. though I think Martin tells me that evolution, once it has solved a problem, is more likely to solve it again, so there may be a model of probability spaces that do have this property. Mike

in math, he comes across as an annoying and ignorant crackpot, and could not have appeared otherwise to any knowledgeable person. for example he sent this garbage to hopkins, who somewhat disappointingly did humour him.

Graphic of a power button icon where the top segment is replaced by a book, symbolizing education as power. The text reads “Education is Power,” with the European Commission logo visible.

💪🏼 What’s the power of a more educated society?

More democracy, equality, and opportunities.

On the International Day of Education, we reaffirm our commitment to enhancing high-quality education, training, and lifelong learning across Europe, through our initiatives like the Union of Skills.

YouTube video by DRM News FULL DISCUSSION: Google's Demis Hassabis, Anthropic's Dario Amodei Debate the World After AGI | AI1G

Amazingly balanced and down-to-earth discussion on the future of AGI.

Very good, knowledgable, informative host with great questions driving it, referring back to relevant past comments.

However you feel about the topic, this is worth watching. 1/4

www.youtube.com/watch?v=02YL...

Massive change. Average unemployment in southern and northern Europe is now the same
economist.com/finance-and-...
from The Economist

Schumpeter aurait déclaré dans son jeune age avoir trois buts: être le meilleur économiste de son époque, être le meilleur amant de Vienne, et être un cavalier accompli. Il disait avoir accompli 2 buts sur 3 (et être assez nul sur un cheval)

Iran report says 16,500 dead in ‘genocide under digital darkness’ Witnesses tell of the brutality inflicted on those taking part in anti-regime protests

16 000 dead protestors according to Iranian doctors

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

I’ve been told that’s how you know it’s good. Great statisticians don’t explain. They lemma.

The Mean-Field Dynamics of Transformers We develop a mathematical framework that interprets Transformer attention as an interacting particle system and studies its continuum (mean-field) limits. By idealizing attention on the sphere, we con...

The arXiv paper uploaded a month ago looked really interesting
arxiv.org/abs/2512.01868

YouTube video by Centre International de Rencontres Mathématiques Philippe Rigollet: The mean-field dynamics of transformers

Looking forward to watching this!

Hundreds of gunshot eye injuries found in one Iranian hospital amid brutal crackdown on protests Doctors in Tehran have described overwhelmed medical staff as thousands of demonstrators have been killed by security forces

"An ophthalmologist in Tehran has documented more than 400 eye injuries from gunshots in a single hospital, as overwhelmed medical staff struggle to cope with the toll of an increasingly violent crackdown on nationwide protests by Iranian authorities." www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

Iran medics describe hospitals overwhelmed with dead and injured protesters Hundreds of people are believed to have been killed and injured by the security forces, with more than 70 bodies brought to one hospital.

"A medic at one Tehran hospital said there were "direct shots to the heads of the young people, to their hearts as well", while a doctor said an eye hospital in the capital had gone into crisis mode"
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Carrying a cup of coffee doesn’t seem of particularly high economic value :-)

YouTube video by TTIC "A Statistical View on Implicit Regularization: Gradient Descent Dominates Ridge" – Jingfeng Wu

I did not grasp everything and had to look some things up but nevertheless enjoyed this talk

It wasn’t clear to me that Helsing’s drones are already in use in Ukraine

Currently on holidays. Must admit it feels good to have thinking capacity for random things I find interesting which are not mathematics

Why your AI companion is not your friend First, tech companies usurped the meaning of ‘friends’ and ‘connection’ — now they are coming for ‘companionship’

Marvellous, moving and wise column by @martinsandbu.ft.com:

First uploaded to arXiv in July 2021!

Very much looking forward to reading this newly published paper over the Christmas break :-)

What to make of the EU decision on funding for Ukraine? It is a good outcome in my opinion. Here is why:

Enjoyed reading the introduction of this paper

🧐

I wonder if it’s not that Europe is more culturally liberal than America (I doubt it is) but that’s it’s more economically egalitarian, greener and less militaristic.

Today, social media platforms hold the sole power to study the effects of feed-ranking algorithms. We developed a platform-independent method that reranks participants’ feeds in real time and used this method to conduct a preregistered 10-day field experiment with 1256 participants on X during the 2024 US presidential campaign. Our experiment used a large language model to rerank posts that expressed antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity (AAPA). Decreasing or increasing AAPA exposure shifted out-party partisan animosity by more than 2 points on a 100-point feeling thermometer, with no detectable differences across party lines, providing causal evidence that exposure to AAPA content alters affective polarization. This work establishes a method to study feed algorithms without requiring platform cooperation, enabling independent evaluation of ranking interventions in naturalistic settings.

New paper in Science:

In a platform-independent field experiment, we show that reranking content expressing antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity in social media feeds alters affective polarization.

🧵

Summer School on the Mathematical Aspects of Data Science - Bernoulli Center This summer school is part of the Bernoulli Center programme at EPFL, to be held from 1 to 5 September 2025. The 2025 Summer School on the Mathematical Foundations of Data Science is designed for MSc ...

Happy to just have found the recordings of the talks from the 2025 Summer School on the Mathematical Aspects of Data Science! I'm going to watch all of these (in time) :-)

Header of a Financial Times article titled "Al doesn't add up if you neglect the mathematicians", with a famous picture depicting the Rev Thomas Bayes

Text of the FT article highlighting the UK government neglect of mathematics at university.

A welcome FT article: on.ft.com/442Mpiq “AI doesn’t add up if you neglect the mathematicians”

China is making trade impossible Europe has nothing to offer and difficult decisions to make

www.ft.com/content/f294...

Paraphrasing one conclusion in the first paper: high mathematical maturity remains paramount but LLM systems might enable progress on problems where one lacks deeper (but "standard") knowledge