John Carlos Baez, Discover and Read the Best of Twitter Threads by @johncarlosbaez

John Carlos Baez

johncarlosbaez

Not just people, but also mathematical objects, can be oppressed! Pushed into the background, silenced, not taught in courses at the appropriate moment. As a result, the development of

I have a Gaussian distribution like this in 2d. You know its variance is 1 but don't know its mean. I randomly pick a point (x₁,x₂) according to this

Hardcore math tweet: The "projection formula" or "Frobenius law" shows up in many branches of math, from logic to group representation theory to the study of sheaves. Let's see

A rotation in 4 dimensions is almost the same as a pair of rotations in 3 dimensions. This is a special fact about 3- and 4-dimensional space that doesn't generalize.

The 3-sphere S³ can be seen as R³ plus a point at infinity. But here London Tsai shows the "Hopf fibration": S³ as a bundle of circles over the 2-sphere.

When men in military fatigues sprang out of an unmarked minivan in front of Mark Pettibone this Wednesday, his first instinct was to run. He made it about a half-block

I love math & physics Twitter! I'll show you what I'm seeing this morning. @neozhaoliang is good for polytopes.https://twitter.com/neozhaoliang/status/1264537193776734208 @j_bertolotti is always good for physics, or in

Let me tell you a bit of @gregeganSF's story about a xenomathematician - a space explorer who studies the mathematics of different civilizations. "It's a significant mathematical result," Rali informed

"Supersymmetry" is a hypothetical symmetry that relates the two kinds of particles in our universe: bosons and fermions. There's no experimental evidence for it.But "superalgebra" is worth studying even if

If the Earth became a black hole, how big would it be? You don't need to know much about general relativity to get the right answer up to a factor

When they have trouble understanding a theorem, ordinary mathematicians ask: "What's an example of this?"Category theorists ask: "What's this an example of?"(1/n) I'm in that situation myself trying to learn

Suppose we take a set X and freely start multiplying its elements in a commutative and associative way. For example if X = {x,y} we get things likexxxxy =