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Thursday, December 5, 2019

Topping the Math Twitter Feeds



Last Sunday the new monthly ranking of Twitter math feeds (from Kelly Truelove) came out with polymath Eric Weinstein leading the pack,** which rather surprised me (though it seems based solely on total number of followers) -- I don't recall if he'd been in the listings in recent prior months. Eric is trained in math, economics, physics, but more recently is known best as a central member of the so-called "Intellectual Dark Web," and doesn't actually tweet much about mathematics.
Moreover, while I generally enjoy Eric in long form (where he often stresses depth and nuance and clarity, in addition to being provocative), I find his Twitter feed far more annoying/irritating (and lacking in depth/nuance/clarity!).
Meanwhile, he appears on many podcasts these days, including his own relatively new one, "The Portal," and in a bit of synchronicity within hours of noticing the Twitter rankings, I discovered his latest (~hour-long) Portal episode focuses on some esoteric aspects of math (and physics and art), not often talked about, with mathematical artist London Tsai (it starts off a bit slow, but begins building at around the 5 minute point):
(this is just audio; video version will likely be up on YouTube at some point)

Here's a (completely separate) clip I've used before of Weinstein talking to Joe Rogan about the octonions (and more):



...Speaking of math podcasts, Numberphile has been doing a great irregular series of them (interviewing various individuals), that you should check out if you haven't already done so:
https://player.fm/series/the-numberphile-podcast

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** interestingly, on a separate page, the listings show an individual's "public" vs. peer group ranking, and while Eric was #1 in the public sphere he was only #95 among "peers," which makes a bit more sense.
And who, you might wonder ranked #1 among math Twitter peers....
Evelyn Lamb! (no. 10 on list)

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