...peculiarity of Bengali culture, I highly highly recommend Jhumpa Lahiri's 'The Namesake'. (In fact all of her books but this one relates to the whole familial nickname thing)

...it's still rare that I come across another Ananyo IRL. I've encountered some online and am LinkedIn buddies with another Ananyo Bhattacharya who keeps being asked whether he wrote The Man from the Future (he's got a PhD from MIT). My family call me by my nickname--'dahk nam'. On that...

LOL. I tell people to pronounce it ON-ON-OH. This is not how it is pronounced in West Bengal. However, since it's mostly non-Indians that say my name, it seemed almost like an affectation demanding it be pronounced in the Bengali manner (specially when growing up in the North)....

Of course! Let me know when you want to drop by!

Thanks Caroline! I’m not looking for another job (certainly not a temporary position). There’s younger hungrier writers out there. Alex! Come into the London institute for mathematical sciences with Alok and tim c one Friday! Drinks from 5pm every week.

Not quite everything. Just everything important 😜

Was Gödel's second incompleteness theorem really von Neumann's? Part I
ananyo.substack.com/p/was-godels-s…
Was Gödel's second incompleteness theorem really von Neumann's? Part II
ananyo.substack.com/p/was-godels-s���

Despite many arguing we shouldn’t care who exactly did what in science, people seem to care very much. Arguably science wouldn’t progress in its current state unless a scientist could establish priority for a discovery.

Second, there’s strong evidence that von Neumann had a proof of the second incompleteness theorem, which Gödel never proved. Moreover when von Neumann informed Gödel of this, Godel misled von Neumann to prevent him scooping him.

The research reveals, first, that von Neumann suggested to Gödel that he transform his first incompleteness theorem from a statement in logic to one in number theory—hugely amping up its significance.

The 1943 paper which Andreessen correctly states describes the core tech underlying modern AI is McCulloch and Pitts's “A Logical Calculus of the ideas Imminent in Nervous Activity”, which I talk about in TMFTF.
McCulloch and Pitts paper
historyofinformation.com/detail.php?i...

Eavesdropping on von Neumann, Turing and Oppenheimer would be great fun though VN and Oppie “stalked each other like alley cats” at Princeton according to one contemporary.
VN WAS more interesting than Oppie. Obviously.
See also
ananyo.substack.com/p/oppie-and-...

Thank you!

Explanatory maths/theoretical physics journalism is hard, important and underfunded. Wish the UK had a @simonsfoundation.org that backed proper, in-depth maths/theory communication with cold, hard cash.

9. Finally, to appreciate just how good all this reporting is, compare and contrast to the utterly useless wiki article on the geometric Langlands.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometr...

8. An interview with Andrew Wiles on his proof of Fermat's last theorem by Plus maths. "What it began was it opened a little door to the Langland's programme, and a new way of trying to get at results in the Langland's programme." plus.maths.org/content/andr...

7. And @kevinhartnett.bsky.social again on the Fargues and Scholze effort to geometrize the local arithmetic Langlands
quantamagazine.org/with-a-new-s...

5. Again in 2007! Now Peter Woit gets into it
math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpr...
6. @kevinhartnett.bsky.social on the work of Ben-Zvi, Venkatesh and Sakellaridis that I mention in the piece.
quantamagazine.org/echoes-of-el...