Weekly update (4/26/2026)

Here’s the usual weekly update.

Reading group done: what next? We reached the end of the book for the reading group. So we are trying to understand what to do next. I am thinking of moving the time slot for the YouTube lives on Saturday 11 am EST, which should be better for Europe and US West coast, and for people who work. The issue now is to understand what topics would be of interest and what format. They should naturally be tightly related to the research program… but they could be anything from recent results, open problem, discussing out people can contribute, … If anyone has any preference, do let me know here in the comments!

Substack unexpected growth! I have no idea what happens, but in a week we went from 88 to 132 (+50%) subscribers here on Substack. No idea what happened… But thanks and welcome!

Linear algebra bare minimum. I have integrated a bare minimum on linear algebra contributed by Demitri Lawrence, one of our undergrad students. Bare minima are meant to be terse summary of an area of knowledge needed in our program. In doing so, we realized how it should actually be done: vector spaces and matrices should be separated into two, as matrices can be used in cases where there are no vector spaces (i.e. adjacency matrix of a graph), and vector spaces use matrices in different ways (e.g. linear transformation and bilinear forms). But that’s what we have for now. Which leads to the next item…

Updated infrastructure for bare minima and technical briefs. I have released the changes I have been making to the website. Under learn more, you’ll notice BRIEFS and BARE MINIMA. I am not completely happy at how it looks now, but at least is functional. The index may have to be rethought when we have more items, but it is ok for now.

Dressing up Reverse Physics. Some of the briefs are about Reverse Physics on quantum mechanics, as I am trying to understand how to better structure the methodology to be more rigorous and in line with Reverse Mathematics. I think I am starting to get the hang of it (essentially, we have a set of conditions, and the logical implication form a pre-order on the set of conditions… we want to find equivalence classes of those conditions, and so on). It’d be nice to have people from the math and philosophy side help out. Maybe a topic for a live discussion?

UROP ended. The three undergrad students finished this here and gave their poster presentation. Thanks to Demitri, Joey and Theron for participating!

Fixed broken text/links on the website, brought up by readers here. Thanks! As usual, I feel I am forgetting something…