Alex Kontorovich Profile picture
Mar 26, 2023 8 tweets 5 min read Read on X
Awesome @MoMath1 presentation on the discovery of the Hat! A summary 🧵:

This is Dave Smith, a mathematical artist. He spends *a lot* of time just messing around, seeing what shapes he can tile in usual ways.

Nov 20, 2022, he emails @cs_kaplan to say: he can't figure out...
2/ how to get this shape to tile periodically. [By the way, Craig, I'd love to know more of the history predating this email -- how did he stumble onto it?]

4 days later: "now wouldn't that be a thing?" !!!

There are two problems: (i) does it really tile the whole plane? And...
3/ (ii) assuming so, it really *impossible* to find some *other* tiling which is periodic.

Same day, Craig replies that he's put it into his software, and indeed it seems to be ever expandable, no sign of running into trouble. (It could've been that 10 layers fit but not 11!)
4/ They play around and eventually find the meta-structure.

Jan 2023, Chaim Goodman-Strauss and Joseph Samuel Myers join the team. By the end of the month, aperiodicity is proved!

The key idea is that you can recover global structure from local! If you look at all possible ...
5/ neighboring patterns at various depths, you learn that you're *forced* into the meta-structure of their aperiodic tiling. So there's no way to do it periodically!

This proof technique reminds me quite a lot of Doron Zeilberger and (his computer) Shalosh B. Ekad's proof of...
6/ Conway's "lost" Cosmological theorem in the Look-And-Say (audioactive decay) sequence.

Anyway, backing up to Dec 6, Dave had yet another discovery. Early Feb: Joseph shows this one is also an einstein, and in fact there's an infinite continuous family of such! This leads to..
7/ yet another, much more conceptual, idea to prove aperiodicity! If both the "hat" and "chevron" have periodic tilings, then the triangular lattice can be translated to the same but scaled by sqrt2 - impossible!

Anyway, amazing work, and congrats again to all involved!
PS Looks like the video link has been posted online; enjoy!

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More from @AlexKontorovich

Jun 16, 2023
then they *would* solve professional-level mathematical problems. (This is not unrelated to issues of "alignment", which I don't have time or expertise to go into here.) Image
And even if I’m completely wrong, and LLMs are indeed capable of producing, in natural language, something that reads like a perfect math paper, how can we ever trust it? We now have to go and referee these thousands or millions of papers that it can produce and determine which,
if any, are actually correct (as opposed to “hallucinations” - which we mathematicians often refer to as “BS”. Or perhaps "undergraduates" - of which I was one not so long ago!). Image
Read 18 tweets
Jun 16, 2023
Notes on my lecture at the National Academies workshop on: AI to Assist Mathematical Reasoning. 🧵

I find it useful to work backwards from an end goal; what should be our “Holy Grail” here? Image
Perhaps it’s that AI should solve the Riemann hypothesis. I see two ways this could go:

1. AI might give a million-line, dense, incomprehensible proof of RH, and I spend the rest of my life just trying to understand what it's saying and why. (Nightmare) Image
Or:

2. AI might give a perfectly comprehensible, beautiful proof of RH! (Is this a dream? Or also a nightmare?!? Now I'm *really* out of business, and spending my life prompting GPT instead of relishing the thought of solving a super hard problem.) Image
Read 26 tweets
Nov 14, 2021
Why I'm excited about @AMathRes: It's as a startup. It's an experiment. Whether it succeeds or fails will be a function of how good its ideas are, and how hard the people that get involved work. (That's why it's rather disheartening to see a coordinated campaign to ...
2/ intimidate founding members into resigning, based purely on ad hominem attacks...) The AMR, again, is only in an organizational phase; the membership (now being assembled) will decide what projects they wish to put their energies towards. That said, here are some of the ...
3/ things I (as a private citizen, not as a Board member) hope we'll end up working on. For background, there have been a number of things we all grumble about but nobody really does anything; for example, democratizing access the world over to high level research mathematics...
Read 10 tweets
Jun 30, 2021
Ugh. Another media frenzy over another purported proof of RH. Usually I just delete such media requests without reply. For some reason (perhaps the fanfare with which this story is spreading), I felt it was my turn to have a quick look and debunk things. TL;DR No, RH isn't proved
2/ If you want to read the paper yourself (which all the press releases seem to not want to let you do; they want you to read the reports of their panels of "experts"- many of whom, if you actually look at the reports, say it's not a proof!...), it's here: researchgate.net/publication/32…
3/ The proof is quintessential in how these go. There is a significant amount of detailed computation on things we teach all our first year grad students, then at some point miracles start happening and details disappear.

The author wants to get cancellation in the Liouville...
Read 13 tweets
May 11, 2021
Thread: What is the Music of the Primes? (From last night's @MoMath1 lecture on the Riemann Hypothesis. TL;DR: watch this @QuantaMagazine video )

The tricky thing about prime numbers is that they’re defined by what they’re not. A composite number is a
2/ product of two other whole numbers; for example, 28 is composite (and hence not prime) since 4 × 7 = 28. For millennia, primes have fascinated people of all ages. Even babies can understand primes! Indeed, before my oldest could talk, he enjoyed playing with a set of 20 blocks
3/ stacking them in neat rectangles of 4×5 or sometimes 2×10. One day he seemed quite upset with his blocks, unable to make a rectangle. It turned out that one of the blocks had rolled under the couch; he experimentally discovered that 19 is prime!
Read 31 tweets
May 10, 2021
Steve (et al), I'm curious for your thoughts on what I think of as the "helix" model of education: introduce many ideas well before the student is ready, in tiny bites, moving on and circling back again and again, so when they get the "big reveal", the concepts are familiar? Eg
2/ "Algebra" should start in pre-K. "You want 6 M&Ms and I gave you 4. So 4+X=6. What is X?" What we do now is: before 6th grade, all symbols are numbers. Then out of nowhere, letters?!?

"Cartesian coordinates" could also start in pre-K: "Go six to the right and five up".
3/ Tangent lines, trig, those ideas could all be introduced much, much earlier, even if the student doesn't yet have all the tools at the ready to solve "general" problems. Once they get said tools, circle back around to same problems and solve them easily, showing the benefit of
Read 4 tweets

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