Asst. Prof at CU Anschutz; PhD in EE; Republican. Work: Biomedical imaging. Hobby: macroecon based investing. All opinions are my own.
Joined February 2009
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Nicholas Dwork retweeted
Here is a beautiful list! 125 free math textbooks, written by the mathematicians who teach the courses and shared on their own university pages. No sign-up, no paywall, no pirated copies. From high school algebra to graduate analysis. š
abakcus.com/book-lists/free-ā¦
Nicholas Dwork retweeted
Pour one out for Porsche marketing that had the misfortune to release their "Glimpse into the Future" the day after @elonmusk back-flipped a 0.8 seconds to 60mph supercar over a semi š
Nicholas Dwork retweeted
"Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3 year old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us" - Edward Teller
Nicholas Dwork retweeted
Iām 40 ā I probably look 40 ā but my three babies (+ one who recently went to heaven) are the best thing Iāve ever done. They keep me young, bring me joy, expand my heart, amplify my purpose, and provide the best company.
Those are smile wrinkles ā¦ and theyāre all worth it.š„°
I'm 56 but look 15 years younger. The reason I look so good? I don't have children. Before the inevitable pile-on begins, there IS evidence that having kids turbocharges ageing: INGE VAN LOTRINGEN trib.al/WZ7yYs7
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This article misrepresents available scientific evidence.
Studies suggest that women who have 2-3 kids are healthiest in old age.
In particular, having one or more sons is associated with lower dementia risk among women.
nypost.com/2026/03/15/heaā¦
womensbrainhealth.org/think-tank/thiā¦
Nicholas Dwork retweeted
"Duality in Optimization: A Visual Tutorial" (by Mohini Bariya): arxiv.org/abs/2609.23751
Nicholas Dwork retweeted
"Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" is a free textbook that clearly introduces the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics. Despite the subject's complexity, it is quite accessible if you already have a strong background in calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations.
The book covers the origins of quantum mechanics and develops the Schrƶdinger equation, Hilbert spaces, operators and eigenvalues, Dirac notation, the uncertainty principle, and symmetry and conservation laws. It then moves on to solutions of the Schrƶdinger equation, finite and infinite square wells, tunneling, the harmonic potential, the hydrogen atom, angular momentum, spin, entanglement and Bell's inequality, perturbation theory, and the electronic structure of atoms, molecules, and solids.
I think it's an interesting read if you want to explore the mathematics behind quantum mechanics, one of the most fascinating areas of modern physics.
gitlab.tudelft.nl/opentextboā¦
Nicholas Dwork retweeted
Matthew Colbrook, George Stepaniants, FranƧoise Tisseur, and Alex Townsend have launched NLA-explained, a public library of readable explanations of proofs in the Open Problems in Numerical Linear Algebra collection. nla-explained.com/
Nicholas Dwork retweeted
I reread this every year.
I cry like a baby every year.
Todd Beamer died a father, husband, and hero.
Todd: Helloā¦ Operatorā¦ listen to me. I canāt speak very loud. This is an emergency. Iām a passenger on a United flight to San Francisco. Our plane has been hijacked.
Lisa: I understand. Can they see you?
Todd: No. There are three that we know of. They have knives ā razor knives, like box cutters. Someone announced from the cockpit there was a bomb. It sounded fake.
Lisa: Your name?Todd: Todd Beamer. United Flight 93.Todd: They killed one passenger in first class. They forced most of us back. Fourteen of us here. Five flight attendants. The guy with the bomb ordered us to sit on the floor.
Lisa: Are you okay?
Todd: Weāre going downā¦ wait. No. Weāre leveling off. We changed directions. Weāre flying east again.
Todd: A guy named Jeremy called his wife. She told him two planes hit the World Trade Center. Lisa, is that true?
Lisa: I have to tell you the truth. Itās very bad. Both towers are gone. A third plane hit the Pentagon. Our country is under attack. Iām afraid your plane may be part of their plan.
Todd: Oh God. Lisa, will you do something for me? Call my wife and my kids. Promise me youāll call.
Lisa: I promise.
Todd: Our home number isā¦ You have the same name as my wife. Lisa. Weāve been married ten years. Sheās pregnant with our third child. Tell her I love her. Iāll always love her. We have two boys ā David, heās 3, and Andrew, heās 1. Tell them their daddy loves them and he is so proud of them. The baby is due January 12th. I saw an ultrasound. We still donāt know if itās a girl or a boy.
Lisa: Iāll tell them. I promise, Todd.(Lisa patches in the FBI.)
Agent: Todd, your plane is on a course for Washington. Best guess is the White House or the Capitol.
Todd: I understand. Iāll be back.
Todd: Everyone knows this isnāt a normal hijacking. We have decided we will not be pawns in their plot.
Lisa: What are you going to do?
Todd: Four of us are going to rush the one with the bomb. Then the cockpit. A stewardess is getting boiling water. Weāll take them out.
Todd: Would you pray with me?They pray the Lordās Prayer. Then: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.
Todd: God help me. Jesus help me.Are you guys ready? Letās Roll.
Nicholas Dwork retweeted
Harnesses often get dismissed as just scaffolding, just prompt engineering, and not real research. But that couldn't be farther from the truth. The same model weights that score 30% on ARC-AGI score 95% with a better harness.
So we gathered a group of researchers and founders working at the frontier to do a deep dive into the state of harnesses.
We cover how we got to this point, the case for making your harness as expressive as possible, and what YC learned building an agent for every employee in the company.
00:00 - @FrancoisChauba1: Why harnesses matter
04:27 - Building an auto-researcher by accident
07:13 - A five minute history of harnesses
13:56 - Self-improving harnesses
18:35 - @sethkarten: Prime Agent, a self-improving RLM harness
21:50 - Context as an L1, L2, L3 cache
24:51 - From Turing machine to von Neumann computer
28:33 - Messaging between agents
30:04 - ARC-AGI results
33:09 - Emulator Bench and GPU kernels
37:30 - @JonSaadFalcon: OpenJarvis, personal AI on personal devices
38:26 - How far behind are local models
39:21 - The five primitives of a personal AI stack
42:47 - Letting cloud models optimize your local stack
43:53 - 800x cheaper than the cloud
45:58 - @josh__france and @jbellregan: QM, YC's agent harness for work
47:29 - A history of YC's internal agents
49:24 - OpenClaw and a fleet of 50 agents
51:04 - Pulling the brain out of the sandbox
54:43 - Letting the agent choose its own sandbox and model
57:16 - The grind tool: budgets on goals
58:50 - Agents don't understand social context
Nicholas Dwork retweeted
After years of working in electronics, this feels like a full circle moment. Many late nights later we are releasing Atlas Fields Studios, free for everyone
fields-studio.arenaphysica.cā¦
The Fields Studio App lets you explore electromagnetic behavior around PCB designs
#buildinpublic ā at New York, NY
Nicholas Dwork retweeted
"Mathematics of Data Science" is a recent, freely available textbook, published in July 2026, specifically written for anyone interested in understanding the mathematics behind the fundamental concepts, methods, and applications of modern data science.
The book covers high-dimensional geometry and probability, concentration of measure, singular value decomposition, principal component analysis, linear regression and regularization, nonlinear dimensionality reduction, diffusion maps, random projections, optimization, classification, support vector machines, generalization bounds, and much more.
Chapter 5 is particularly interesting. It is entirely dedicated to graphs, networks, and clustering, including k-means and spectral clustering. It also provides an intuitive mathematical explanation of Google PageRank, showing how the structure of links between web pages can be represented and analyzed to estimate their relative importance.
The sections on classification problems are also worth reading. They cover binary and linear classifiers, logistic regression, confusion matrices, ROC analysis, support vector machines, multiclass classification, and the mathematical foundations of generalization.
arxiv.org/pdf/2607.11938
Nicholas Dwork retweeted
On July 2, 1982, a 33-year-old truck driver named Larry Walters tied 42 helium weather balloons to a Sears lawn chair, strapped on a parachute, packed a BB gun, sandwiches, and a six-packā¦ and cut the rope.
He expected to float a few hundred feet over his San Pedro backyard.
Instead he shot up like a rocket to 16,000 feet ā straight into the main approach path for LAX.
Two airline pilots radioed the tower: they had just passed a man in a lawn chair holding a gun at 16,000 feet.
For 45 minutes he floated over Los Angeles, freezing, too scared to shoot more balloons. Finally he started popping them one by one and came down tangled in power lines in Long Beach, blacking out part of the neighborhood.
When police asked why he did it, he said:
āA man canāt just sit around.ā
FAA fined him $4,000. America turned him into a folk hero ā Lawnchair Larry.
True story.
š¤ Made with AI
Nicholas Dwork retweeted
Extended version of my talk from ENGAGE about teaching conformal geometry (useful for animation, cosmology, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics etc) using Geometric Algebra š edited from my recent stream
youtu.be/GKzZi9BMt0c
Nicholas Dwork retweeted
Jeff Hinton dismissed gradient descent in the 1970s because he thought models would get stuck. He won the Nobel Prize in 2024 partly for being wrong about that.
Every time ChatGPT gets better after a training run, it's because 1.2 billion parameters fell through a wormhole in a loss landscape - not because they crawled downhill one step at a time. This video visualizes exactly what that looks like inside Llama 3.2.
20 minutes. Bookmark & watch today. The misconception that almost stopped AI is more interesting than the solution.
Nicholas Dwork retweeted
This is actually a beautiful undergrad economics question. Economic theory says that Joe is right: building houses always lowers prices, but adding highway lanes doesn't always reduce congestion. Why do free markets work for houses, but not for highways?
Nicholas Dwork retweeted
An absolute banger of a paper.
"A Gentle Introduction to Matrix Calculus" by econometrics legend Jan Magnus ā one of the clearest explanations of matrix derivatives ever written. Published in the Journal of Econometrics in 2024.
If you work in econometrics, machine learning, statistics or optimisation, this paper is pure gold.
Free, in my Awesome Math Books list (econometrics section)
github.com/valeman/Awesome_Mā¦
