Diana Gillooly
banner
dianagillooly.bsky.social
Diana Gillooly
@dianagillooly.bsky.social
Mathematical sciences editor @princetonupress.bsky.social; was
@cambridgeup.bsky.social. Westwood, Los Angeles well-wisher
Reposted by Diana Gillooly
November 10, 2025 at 7:45 PM
Reposted by Diana Gillooly
Good morning! Day 4 of the Sandwich Guy’s trial. He is finally wearing a suit (the rest of the week’s evidence suggests he seems to prefer pullovers in cooler weather). The jury has a note for the judge.
November 6, 2025 at 3:30 PM
Great to see people looking ahead to building back better @princetonupress.bsky.social
"There's my mathematician!," Clinton said when she saw me. We had a lovely conversation about math, democracy, my book, and Bosnia.

Also met and chatted with @repemilyrandall.bsky.social, another amazing Wellesley alumna.
November 5, 2025 at 8:57 PM
Reposted by Diana Gillooly
NEW: Common Crawl, the massive archiver of the web, has gotten cozy with AI companies and is providing paywalled articles for training data. They’re also lying to publishers who have asked for material to be removed. “The robots are people too,” CC’s exec director told us when we asked about this.
The Nonprofit Feeding the Entire Internet to AI Companies
Common Crawl claims to provide a public benefit, but it lies to publishers about its activities.
www.theatlantic.com
November 4, 2025 at 12:15 PM
Reposted by Diana Gillooly
Day 3 of the “no more than 2” day trial of Sandwich Guy. The prosecution intends to rest; the defense hasn’t decided yet. Dispute over jury instructions continues, a few morsels (sorry) to follow.
November 5, 2025 at 3:44 PM
Reposted by Diana Gillooly
Back for Day 2 of Sandwich Guy’s trial. In government opening statement: “This case is about the fact that you can’t go around throwing stuff at people when you’re mad.”
November 4, 2025 at 2:43 PM
On this, National Sandwich Day, keep up with voir dire for DC sandwich guy with @ryanjreilly.com
Jury selection is underway in the trial of the DC “sandwich guy,” but Judge Nichols is doing the whole thing with hushers. Closing voir dire has previously been a violation of 6th Amendment. @nbcnews.com and other outlets have raised objections. www.nbcnews.com/politics/tru...
Jury selection begins in the trial of D.C.'s 'sandwich guy'
Sean Dunn went viral this summer for throwing a salami sub at a Customs and Border Protection agent.
www.nbcnews.com
November 3, 2025 at 7:07 PM
And now we breathe
November 2, 2025 at 4:19 AM
Two books I've been waiting for!
October 30, 2025 at 7:53 PM
Reposted by Diana Gillooly
Amazon is helping fund a $300 million build of a ballroom for the White House.

Independent bookstores are donating to food banks and organizations that help with food insecurity.

They are not the same.
October 30, 2025 at 4:01 PM
Eagerly awaiting my Prop 50 flyer from the Christmas Adventurers.
October 28, 2025 at 2:02 AM
"Big Tent" Algebraic Geometry. Your ring isn't Noetherian? This book still cares about you.
An accessible, motivated introduction to one of the most dynamic areas of mathematics.

Ravi Vakil's The Rising Sea: Foundations of Algebraic Geometry is now available (16 Dec UK pub).

Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

#AlgebraicGeometry #Mathematics #Math
October 22, 2025 at 6:25 PM
Reposted by Diana Gillooly
In the early days of quantum chemistry, before we had computers to calculate the shapes of electron orbitals, one man invented a mechanical machine that simulated their shapes. My latest column for @chemistryworld.com
www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/the-...
The simple machine that visualised atomic orbitals
In 1931, Harvey Elliott White developed a device that traced out the shapes of electron clouds by approximating solutions to the Schrödinger equation
www.chemistryworld.com
September 18, 2025 at 9:37 AM
Reposted by Diana Gillooly
Since it resonated with the audience, I’ll recap my main argument against AGI here. ‘General intelligence’ is like phlogiston, or the aether. It’s an outmoded scientific concept that does not refer to anything real. Any explanatory work it did can be done better by a richer scientific frame. 1/3
This was a truly heartening day, with deeply thoughtful challenges to the dominant narrative framed around AGI, coming from across disciplines and perspectives. Felt like the tide might finally be turning a bit, at least among the scientific community. Thanks @royalsociety.org!
1/2 I'm looking forward to taking part in a panel on AGI and the Turing Test, tomorrow afternoon (Thurs 2nd Oct) at the @royalsociety.org, w/ Dame Wendy Hall, Shannon Vallor, William Isaac, & Sir Nigel Shadbolt. royalsociety.org/science-even...
October 2, 2025 at 10:09 PM
Except that. That's a bad lifeboat.
October 15, 2025 at 2:01 AM
The Rising Sea around the world, part 3: here in Los Angeles -- with a normal-sized cat for scale.
October 8, 2025 at 9:03 PM
The Rising Sea around the world, part 2: here on display -- with other excellent titles -- at the @mathmoves.bsky.social library.
October 8, 2025 at 7:57 PM
The Rising Sea around the world: here on display at the Clay Math(s) Institute annual meeting in Oxford UK (official publication date is 21 October).
October 8, 2025 at 7:56 PM
Reposted by Diana Gillooly
“When you get a suspicious book, “you look it up to see what else the [author] has written. And you see there's 30 things, and none of them have any reviews, and they were all written in the last two years,” DeMeester-Lane says.”
How Local Librarians Keep AI Slop Off the Shelves
AI is being used to create nonsensical, sometimes dangerously inaccurate books. Local librarians are tasked with keeping these volumes out of their collections.
www.governing.com
October 6, 2025 at 5:18 PM
I haven't read the whole list(!), but saw some excellent math books for unbelievably friendly prices...
Our 70% Off Sale is live! 📚

Save on thousands of select titles & editions across subjects until October 31. Explore the books on sale and refresh your shelves this autumn: press.princeton.edu/sale/70-off

#ReadUP
October 3, 2025 at 8:50 AM
Reposted by Diana Gillooly
This is what happens when Wittgenstein edits your math textbook.

#science #philosophysky #math #mathematics #academia #philsky
September 28, 2025 at 1:45 PM
Walking the Carcassonne ramparts as Every Day Is Like Sunday floats up from the town. Love that, musically, it's always the 80s in Europe.
September 25, 2025 at 4:05 PM
Brilliant piece
Against my better instincts, I have written some notes on how human probability judgements work and what you should expect from surveys that ask people to guess what proportion of the population is transgender. I hope never to speak of this matter again
Some notes on probability judgement – Notes from a data witch
For the love of fuck, literally nobody thinks that 20% of the population is transgender. Please stop sharing that ridiculous YouGov statistic
blog.djnavarro.net
September 21, 2025 at 8:23 PM
Celebrate the communication medium that's inherently local!
How a modern radio works, told through mathematics, history, and selected puzzles.

Paul J. Nahin's The Mathematical Radio is now available in #paperback. Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

#Math #Mathematics #History
September 18, 2025 at 8:37 PM