Professor and Department Chair @Berkeley_EECS. Research Scientist (part-time) @GoogleResearch. Founder @addiscoder. Posts are personal views. 🇻🇮🇺🇸🇪🇹
Berkeley, CA
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A @Stanford professor just threatened me with police. After BBQ Becky, Permit Patty, Golfcart Gail, and all the memes, we now have Retweet Rachel. Public advisory: don't call the cops on black people for no reason. Black people disagreeing with you on Twitter is not a crime.
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It is horrifying that the CMF claiming to uplift black children was co-authored by a person who finds police intimidation against blacks acceptable. I encourage concerned alumni and members of the @Stanford community to express your concern to the university administration.
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To be clear, what I *re*tweeted is not misinformation, not private, and not harassment. It's a screenshot from the public record. See for yourself: page 376 of tinyurl.com/oxnardcontract
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My 5-year old says she wants to be a professor, so I took her to my office for a preliminary interview. I think she’s ready, what do you think?
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2+ yrs ago I co-authored a letter warning not offering Algebra I in public middle schools was anti-equity, as the wealthy could go private.
Yesterday I discovered a great example: the main CA Math Framework author put her kids in a private school teaching Algebra I in 8th grade.
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"Students in upper-track math courses are no smarter or better at math than others. But their families have managed to give them a jump-start through additional after-school programs, tutors and other resources" --SFUSD administrator who supported detracking
Insane quote ... 1/
In 2014, San Francisco Unified School District pushed algebra to 9th grade from 8th grade, in an attempt to eliminate the tracking of students into lower and upper math paths and overturn disparities.
How did this 10-year experiment pan out?
Read more: edsurge.com/news/2024-12-10-…
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~7 yrs ago I asked an ML faculty member to explain transformers+attention to me — not just the math, but the motivation. What they described was not nearly clear as the below video (also see the video before and the one after). The construction is completely clear and natural.
The next chapter about transformers is up on YouTube, digging into the attention mechanism: piped.video/eMlx5fFNoYc
The model works with vectors representing tokens (think words), and this is the mechanism that allows those vectors to take in meaning from context.
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Happy Adwa Victory Day!
129 years ago, Italian military forces attempting to colonize Ethiopia were completely annihilated in the Battle of Adwa by the Ethiopian Imperial Army, under the leadership of Emperor Menelik II and his generals.
The defeat was so embarrassing for Italy that their Prime Minister, Francesco Crispi, resigned just a week later. Five days after that, the King of Italy declared his birthday a day of mourning.
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Students making me blush w/ course evals
"This man is insane on the blackboard – it's like he's pouring out knowledge."
"Berkeley has a lot of great professors, but something is really special with this one! The clarity of the lectures and his technical depth is just wild."
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In the midst of this “reckless disregard for accuracy” thing, I’d like to point out that despite what her Instagram page might suggest, she actually has no affiliation with the Stanford mathematics department.
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Today is my first as department chair at @Berkeley_EECS
When I left Harvard 6 yrs ago, I just saw it as moving from one great place to another. Then, it hit me at a state school I'm also now a public servant, and that fact weighs on me every day. I aim to serve the best I can.
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@elonmusk and @sama may not agree on much of late, but do agree AI is built on strong math foundations, including algebra and calculus, applauding @UofCalifornia for recent clarifications on math requirements for admission.
Many industry leaders signed:
mathmatters.ai
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I've spent 1000+ hours setting up/contributing to educational programs for the benefit of black kids for free (addiscoder.com, jamcoders.org.jm, DHBSRI). Total I've made: $0 (actually negative, since I sometimes spent my own money). Representation matters.
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Just imagine how much more fulfilled her life would have been if she had waited until 14 to learn algebra.
Earlier this year, a 17-year-old high school student named Hannah Cairo solved a 40-year-old mystery about how waves behave, surprising and exciting mathematicians. @KSHartnett reports: quantamagazine.org/at-17-han…
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Me paying for items at a Berkeley Walgreens this morning while watching a shoplifter walk right out the front door with stolen goods…
Cashier yells: “you know I’m going to have to report you”
*shoplifter ignores and keeps walking*
Me to cashier: “I’m curious, what are you allowed to do to stop shoplifters in cases like this?”
Cashier: “absolutely nothing”
Me: “what if there’s a security guard right there? They can’t do anything?”
Cashier: “nope”
😳🤣
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arxiv.org/abs/2203.00671
"Maximum Flow and Minimum-Cost Flow in Almost-Linear Time"
A very big congratulations to the authors!
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At @Berkeley_EECS we always work to keep our curriculum fresh. Our intro ML course CS 189 just got a drastic makeover this semester (thanks @profjoeyg @NargesNorouzi!) and now includes ~12 lectures on e.g. Adam, PyTorch, various NN architectures, LLMs, and more (see eecs189.org/fa25/).
We also this semester launched a modern, brand new
mezzanine NLP course by @alsuhr (EECS 183/283A, cal-nlp-class.github.io/fa25…), with a made over Advanced NLP course launching in Sp26 by @sewon__min.
Harvard and Stanford students tell me their professors don't understand AI and the courses are outdated.
If elite schools can't keep up, the credential arms race is over. Self-learning is the only way now.
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The proposed CA Math Framework states improving math learning for black students as central motivation and has 0 black authors. Instead, one author has alarmingly lucrative consulting deals with school districts with large minority populations, charging $5,000/hr.
CORRECTION: At the 08/04/21 meeting, the Oxnard School District board was forced to approve an addendum to @joboaler's contract.
She went back & required that they correct the error in the original contract -- she collected $40,000 ($5,000/hour) -- not $20,000 ($2,500/hour).
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Six years of marriage and three kids later (one in the belly!). Life couldn’t be better. ❤️ Happy Sunday all!
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Why has the desire to make math more accessible, for many folks, translated into wanting to get rid of calculus? Pedagogical debates should not create confusion on what content is important. We should 1) identify knowledge is important, then 2) find the best way to teach it. 1/
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I've been a theorist working on algorithms in the academic ivory tower for 17 years. Last summer I started part-time in industry 1 day per week (@Google); this is fairly common amongst my more applied colleagues in ML/systems, but less so for theorists. I highly recommend it. 🧵
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From an article yesterday... in a high school student newspaper, written by a teenager in Oregon.😳
Out of the mouths of babes.
"Boaler didn’t meaningfully address the flaws in her work. Instead, she accused her critics of harassment, sexism, and even racism, despite the fact that her own research had disproportionately harmed minority students by failing to prepare them for college-level math...
She filed complaints against her colleagues, threatened lawsuits, and even called the FBI...
Concerns remain that Boaler’s methods prioritize ideology over evidence, relying on studies with significant methodological flaws. As debates over math instruction intensify, Boaler’s legacy, like Lucy Calkins’ in reading, raises important questions about how educational reforms gain traction and how their real-world impacts are measured." 1/
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Started a new role today. Excited to serve our fantastic students, staff, researchers, my faculty colleagues, and all else in our community!
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Not hard to imagine how this happens. After buying our house, we wanted a custom bookshelf. 1st quote: $9000+installation+tax. Final contract: $1743 total (diff. vendor). >80% cheaper. Now imagine a bureaucrat who doesn’t negotiate/shop around hard because it’s not their money.
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Now years later, Yosef has degrees from MIT and works in tech.
From the YouTube link above, good thing for Yosef, he lived in a community that showed him love and support, and did not try to destroy his self-image with low expectations. 5/5
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Founder of the most successful tech startup accelerator on Earth advising founders to start their companies outside the USA. Those now in Washington don’t fully comprehend the damage they’re causing. We need a hard pivot back to pro-science, pro-tech, pro-skilled immigration.
A smart foreign-born undergrad at a US university asked me if he should go to the UK to start his startup because of the random deportations here. I said that while the median startup wasn't taking things to this extreme yet, it would be an advantage in recruiting.
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Incorrect calculation. 60% indirect cost rate means for every dollar charged to the grant for the project, the university charges an *additional* 60 cents as overhead. So it’s 60/160 ~37.5% overhead, not 60%. The research has to happen somewhere — this pays for e.g. facilities.
Can you believe that universities with tens of billions in endowments were siphoning off 60% of research award money for “overhead”?
What a ripoff!
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Rest in peace to my grandfather, who lived a long and honorable life. Passed in his sleep at the age of 100. Someone needs to make a movie about his life, because he had so many unbelievable stories. Just one story: 1/
(P.S. correction to below: he was a navy doctor, not army)
Happy 100th birthday to my grandpa, who has been my model for perseverance and grit, from training to be an army doctor for WW2 (@HowardU ‘47), to running a successful hog farm in Alabama as a side hussle, then serving the Philly community for >50 years in psychiatry, … 1/
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Looking again at this video, something I want to highlight:
The people pushing for dumbing down math say they want to do it for 'equity', and invoke helping black students as their cause. Meanwhile, the only black committee member in the room** is the one calling BS and refused to vote for it.
Note also:
- A black alumni club at Cal pushed back against this nonsense: drive.google.com/file/d/1z0a…
- As did the majority of black UC faculty across the state in fields closest to data science: drive.google.com/file/d/1KVB…
- As did this church deacon who's mentored thousands of inner city kids in Los Angeles for over 25 years: drive.google.com/file/d/1qQO…
Maybe if the goal is to support black folks, the legislators should listen to what black folks are actually saying.
** The other black woman in center, Jeanice Warden, is committee staff, and hence does not speak during hearings and is not a legislator with voting rights.
Legislator @AsmLaShae bravely stands up to her committee to say the obvious: K-12 should should prepare college-bound kids for college.
Alas, her voice of reason fell on deaf ears.
AB 1217 strips UC/CSU from controlling college admission reqs, and to take orders from K-12. 1/
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“mathematical breakthroughs are not powered solely (or even primarily) by ‘Eureka’ moments of genius, but are in fact largely a product of hard work” —Terry Tao
terrytao.wordpress.com/caree…
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MIT wins the ICPC World Finals in Dhaka. First North American team to win since 1997! @jcvbcn
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This saga has now entered the realm of the absurd.
‘Beckles frequently collaborates with fellow Brit Jo Boaler, the Stanford mathematics education professor who played a key role in shaping the CMF and who has recently come under intense scrutiny for allegedly engaging in academic fraud… next month the two will co-host a webinar at Stanford University … In 2007, investigative journalists uncovered [Beckles’] involvement in a long trail of financial scandals in the U.K. charity sector — including 19 court judgements levying fines totaling almost £70,000 at her various defunct businesses, unpaid debts of £125,000 … The investigation culminated in a front-page story in London’s Evening Standard that year revealing that Beckles had taken £12,000 from underprivileged children in East London to fund “an educational trip” to the Caribbean that never happened, and then went to South Korea, where she reportedly attended a convention of the Moonies, a controversial religious movement often described as a cult.’
"A disgraced education 'guru' and reality TV star, who vanished from Britain after becoming embroiled in a string of financial scandals."
That's how The Independent described California “math equity” policy consultant Yolande Beckles — a woman who left her native U.K. with 19 standing court judgements levying almost £70,000 in fines at her defunct businesses and a front-page exposé revealing that she had defrauded underprivileged schoolkids of £12,000.
Now over a decade later, Beckles has infiltrated the education policymaking establishment in California, having consulted for the new math framework that recommends against teaching most gifted middle schoolers algebra at SFUSD public schools.
She’s currently serving as vice chair of LAUSD’s Parent Advisory Committee, and is set to give a webinar at Stanford next month with Jo Boaler, the Stanford professor who is arguably most responsible for California’s ‘equitable’ math curriculum recommendations. Explosive new reporting from @metaversehell today for Pirate Wires. 👇
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The Harvard admissions website no longer mentions data science (source: college.harvard.edu/guides/p…, compared with web.archive.org/web/20221101… just 2 months ago). Universities are more deeply looking into these courses and realizing they're not appropriate math replacements. 1/3
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Somehow still claiming 2 of the top 3 most popular videos ever on Harvard's official YouTube channel. So many people interested in van Emde Boas trees!
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He had never heard of the SAT/TOEFL until we told him not long before he took it. He studied for it reading resources himself on his smartphone and got a perfect 800 on the math subject test. Where were his "after-school programs, tutors, and other resources"? 4/
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Team Andalus, Adama Science and Technology University 🇪🇹. First Ethiopian team to participate in the ICPC World Finals. 🇧🇩
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Very impressive!
8-9 yrs ago Jakub was a postdoc in my group, and we wrote a very nice paper together on an interesting streaming data structure lower bound (maintain a dynamic multiset S, subset of [U], subject to ins/del, and “query?” must return some/any elt of S — we proved the optimal space is lg(1/p)lg^2(U) bits to succeed with prob. 1-p). Then he left the postdoc slightly early, in 2017, to join this small nonprofit startup that was developing AI to play DotA (OpenAI).
Now he’s one of a few people changing the world with one of the biggest technological breakthroughs within my lifetime, if not longer. I can only regret having convinced him to spend some brain cycles working on a problem that took time away he could have been working on AGI!
Last week, our reasoning models took part in the 2025 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), the world’s premier university-level programming competition. Our system solved all 12 out of 12 problems, a performance that would have placed first in the world (the best human team solved 11 problems).
This milestone rounds off an intense 2 months of competition performances by our models:
- A second place finish in AtCoder Heuristics World Finals
- Gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad
- Gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics
- And now, a gold medal, first place finish at the ICPC World Finals.
I believe these results, coming from a family of general reasoning models rooted in our main research program, are perhaps the clearest benchmark of progress this year. These competitions are great self-contained, time-boxed tests for the ability to discover new ideas. Even before our models were proficient at simple arithmetic, we looked towards these contests as milestones of progress towards transformative artificial intelligence.
Our models now rank among the top humans in these domains, when posed with well-specified questions and restricted to ~5 hours. The challenge now is moving to more open-ended problems, and much longer time horizons. This level of reasoning ability, applied over months and years to problems that really matter, is what we’re after - automating scientific discovery.
This rapid progress also underscores the importance of safety & alignment research. We still need more understanding of the alignment properties of long-running reasoning models; in particular, I recommend reviewing the fascinating findings from the study of scheming in reasoning models that we released today (nitter.app/OpenAI/status/19683617…)!
Congratulations to my teammates that poured their hearts into getting these competition results, and to everyone contributing to the underlying fundamental research that enables them!
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Happy Adwa Victory Day.
An African victory heard around the world.
The Atlanta Constitution, March 4 1896: "This is the second crushing defeat that the Abyssinians have inflicted upon the Italians since the latter attempted to extend their power in the domain of King Menelik."
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“threatened to call” is future tense
Her words were “…is now being taken up by police…”, which suggested the call had already been made.
She later backtracked and claimed the whole thing was a big misunderstanding and that she neither had called nor planned to call the cops on me. 🤷🏽♂️
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Don't track everyone downward and claim a false equity victory. The rich can maneuver around attempts at tracking everyone downward, as they did in San Francisco by paying for extracurricular courses and tutoring. Rather, do the hard work to lift everyone up.
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Found out my childhood barber from the Virgin Islands has a barber son in the East Bay, so I took my son to get a haircut from my barber’s son. :)
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እንኳን ለአዲሱ ዓመት በሰላም አደረሳችሁ
Dinner on Ethiopian New Year with two new professors about to start at MIT, Prof. Iwnetim Abate (Materials Science & Eng.) and Prof. Loza Tadesse (Mechanical Eng.). I’m proud to see my friends doing big things.
Welcome to 2015.
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🙏🏽
Congratulations to
Jelani Nelson,
winner of the 2023 SIGACT Distinguished Service award
sigact.org/prizes/service/20…
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Well, in CA 58% of Asian kids take Calculus in high school vs 6% of black kids. Is math not nutrition for the brain? It is misguided to respond to these numbers by suggesting removing advanced math. Rather, government should do whatever it takes to ensure every kid is “well fed”.
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Excited to be the speaker at this year’s Stanford Math Commencement Ceremony! Last year’s speech by @3blue1brown will be a tough act to follow, but if I do a tenth as well then I’ll call it a success. 😉
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“Grades on high-school transcripts too often bear little relationship to a student’s mastery of crucial skills: A student may have graduated with an A in calculus yet lack the capacity to solve simple algebraic equations.”
Someone should invent a test that provides some sort of standardized measurement, … a “scholastic aptitude test” if you will …
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I grew up on Code Jam. RIP.
20 years, more than a million participants and billions of lines of code later, our coding competitions are coming to a close. It's been an honor to learn and enjoy coding with you. Thank you.
Join us 4/15 at 2 p.m. UTC for farewell rounds of competition: goo.gle/3SlSIGA
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AddisCoder had a State Department grant cancelled. The weirdest part of this: AddisCoder has no, and never has had, any federal grant, from the State Dept or from anywhere else. So what got cancelled? 🤔
(They did want to give us $$ at some point, but we didn’t agree on terms.)
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Garry and I pushed in this video to stop AB 500 and AB 1217. As of today, both bills are now dead.
The people are awake, and the tides are turning. Our elected leaders destroying K-12 education will no longer be tolerated.
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It's clear these (non-?)answers were written by lawyers, which is a failure mode I've seen often: leaders forgetting that *they* lead, and that general counsel's job is only to...counsel. Don't let counsel steer the ship.
"Does calling for genocide of X violate your university's code of conduct?"
is an easy 'yes' for any value of X. Save the lawyer'y non-answers for trickier questions.
The presidents of @Harvard, @MIT, and @Penn were all asked the following question under oath at today’s congressional hearing on antisemitism:
Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your university’s] code of conduct or rules regarding bullying or harassment?
The answers they gave reflect the profound moral bankruptcy of Presidents Gay, Magill and Kornbluth.
Representative @EliseStefanik was so shocked with the answers that she asked each of them the same question over and over again, and they gave the same answers over and over again.
In short, they said:
It ‘depends on the context’ and ‘whether the speech turns into conduct,’ that is, actually killing Jews.
This could be the most extraordinary testimony ever elicited in the Congress, certainly on the topic of genocide, which to remind us all is:
“the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group”
The presidents’ answers reflect the profound educational, moral and ethical failures that pervade certain of our elite educational institutions due in large part to their failed leadership.
Don’t take my word for it.
You must watch the following three minutes. By the end, you will be where I am.
They must all resign in disgrace.
If a CEO of one of our companies gave a similar answer, he or she would be toast within the hour.
Why has antisemitism exploded on campus and around the world?
Because of leaders like Presidents Gay, Magill and Kornbluth who believe genocide depends on the context.
To think that these are the leaders of Ivy League institutions that are charged with the responsibility to educate our best and brightest.
On the bright side, our congressional leaders deserve accolades for showing tremendous leadership and moral clarity in their statements, by the questions they asked, and the respectfulness with which they conducted the hearing.
It was a masterclass of how our government and democracy should operate.
If you have time, please watch the entire hearing. Throughout the hearing, the three behaved like hostile witnesses, exhibiting a profound disdain for the Congress with their smiles and smirks, and their outright refusal to answer basic questions with a yes or no answer.
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I'm not the first to say this, but I'll repeat: an interesting thing about differential privacy is it needs theorems even in practice. You can implement heuristic algs that are fast on your data, but 'heuristic privacy' doesn't exist. A mechanism isn't private without a theorem.
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Ackman says he’s going to review all MIT faculty’s work for *plagiarism*. What I find silly about this is …in many fields (my own?), my hunch is plagiarism isn’t really a popular form of malfeasance, I imagine especially in STEM fields (which MIT is dominated by). In my field, for example, papers have very little prose but lots of equations. Rather than plagiarism, bad author behavior might take the form of claiming a result as new despite it being already known, not citing works that should have been compared against, or having buggy proofs (and even then, fairly often these things happen accidentally, and it’s really only fraud if you can show intent, which is hard). But plagiarism? I suspect it’s very rare, especially in the “meat” of the paper that readers in these fields actually care about (there are a lot of low quality introduction sections out there …).
In other fields, say experimental ones, I imagine popular forms of malfeasance might include fudging/making up data — again, not plagiarism. Very hard to detect unless Ackman’s crew tries replicating every experiment ever done at MIT. Good luck with that.
My wife, @NeriOxman, was just contacted by Business Insider claiming that they have identified other plagiarism in her work including 15 examples in her dissertation where she did not cite Wikipedia as a source.
Business Insider told us that they are publishing their story this evening. As a result, we don't have time to research their claims prior to publication.
It is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family.
This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews.
We will begin with a review of the work of all current @MIT faculty members, President Kornbluth, other officers of the Corporation, and its board members for plagiarism.
We will be using MIT's own plagiarism standards which can be found here:
integrity.mit.edu/handbook/w…
We will share our findings in the public domain as they are completed in the spirit of transparency.
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It blows my mind that as SFUSD Superintendent Richard Carranza got rid of 8th grade Alg 1 for all students in SFUSD in the name of equity, then in his subsequent job as NYC Dept of Ed Chancellor declared a policy of 8th grade Alg 1 for all in the name of equity. Complete aboutface with no explanation -- where's the accountability for the tens of thousands of students affected in SF for the last decade?
NYC Public Schools under Carranza:
"We know that equity is more than a slogan, it is the promise we make to our students and it requires hard work...
Equity means meeting every student where they are, and providing the support, resources, and high expectations for them to achieve at consistently high levels...
Through Algebra for All, by 2022, every student will have access to algebra in eighth grade, complete algebra no later than ninth grade, and there will be academic supports in place in elementary and middle school to help more students become ready for algebra in eighth grade."
web.archive.org/web/20190321…
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It's about the crime frequency. I lived 16 yrs in Greater Boston and can't remember anyone I personally knew who was the victim of *any* crime. Then since moving to the Bay <4 yrs ago, my wife's co-worker was carjacked at gunpoint, my student's car was smashed 12 days ago ...
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The California State system is, I believe, the largest university system in the USA (by enrollment). Its systemwide academic senate has published a formal resolution stating the UC is approving courses as math that don't meet state standards. Specifically, data science courses 1/
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The impact of federal research funding. 👇🏾
The first line item alone is probably more than the total NSF allocation aggregated across all its directorates, over all years combined since its 1950 founding. A no-brainer investment.
Founders who were PhD or post-doc in my lab at Berkeley, **largely funded by NSF / DoD grants**, start-up, market cap (collected by OpenAI Deep Research)
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His family income was ~$65 USD/mo and parents never attended college. His dad was a security guard and mom stayed at home. The only reason he owned a smartphone in high school is because he won the cash to buy one in an academic competition -- otherwise he couldn't afford it. 3/
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This is so incredibly silly. The Justice Department is claiming “DEI in admissions” is hurting Asians at e.g. UC Berkeley. But Prop 209 has mandated race-blind admissions at the UCs since the 90s, and in fact Berkeley is ~4% black and >50% Asian. So what are they talking about?
Justice Department probes major California universities for 'illegal DEI' in admissions latimes.com/california/story…
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Happy 100th birthday to my grandpa, who has been my model for perseverance and grit, from training to be an army doctor for WW2 (@HowardU ‘47), to running a successful hog farm in Alabama as a side hussle, then serving the Philly community for >50 years in psychiatry, … 1/
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In Texas, the State Board of Education brought in a university math professor to provide input on K-12 math education.
In California, officials ignored letters signed by hundreds of math (and other) professors, then tried introducing laws that painted professors as their enemy.
Texas State Board of Education brought me in today to testify about #math education and curriculum!
I was impressed! They brought some students to testify first, representing a range of levels in math, all the way to very high end. Board was compassionate about everyone, and cared about people who were struggling. But they also were enthusiastic about exceptional performers (and wanted to make more). They asked kids who were really into math how to get other kids to also love math. They want kids to learn as much as they are ready for!
Board members had interesting backgrounds. Several had taught in classrooms, but they were all also creators/entrepreneurs/business-owners. So, they were directly familiar with how world of employment is changing.
I shared several messages in my remarks and the follow-up Q&A. In AI era, people must learn how to think adaptively. That makes math relevant as the equivalent of going to the gym to train for sport. But then it’s important to explore a different teaching style, where #teachers ask kids to invent their own ways to do problems, and have free ranging discussions about ideas where students are responsible for creating approaches, instead of just listening. An expert next to me put it well: when teaching a lesson, ideally one is prepared to discuss topics across a wider range of grade levels than the immediate level, to have such a rich discussion.
I made the radical proposal that in order to be more adaptive to the rapidly changing post-AI landscape, teachers should teach fewer hours each day, with spare hours replaced by themselves continually learning new content, not even just in their own field. If profession is designed around teachers as perpetual scholars, that’s similar to professors, and might attract people who love lifelong learning to join. Teachers in the room were enthusiastic about this idea. One way to resolve shortage is to make it more attractive to be a teacher, not just financially but also operationally.
There should also be less emphasis around testing a list of curricular knowledge points, so teachers have space to lead wide ranging discussions.
I also shared that one way to excite students is through combining teaching with performing arts. I explained our experience with LIVE, where we hire professional actors to coach math people on charisma while math people teach in the creative-discussion way above. That shows that the approach is practically scalable.
I shared that one of our focus areas going forward is to bring this type of learning to rural America, thanks to fact that we finally made online classes actually engaging for the masses.
Texas State Board was really engaging to talk with! They are innovative and open minded.
sboe.texas.gov/state-board-o…
If any other education boards want new ideas that rethink systems for the age of AI, I’m happy to share there too.
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Vivek doesn't understand overhead rates. x% overhead means for every $1 spent for direct costs, an extra x cents goes toward overhead. An overhead rate of 70% means .7/1.7 =~ 41% goes to overhead. 70% going to overhead would imply a 233% overhead rate, which doesn't exist. 1/
NIH grant distributions have turned into a joke, but the most ridiculous part is that *70%* of the federal funds often granted to these universities goes to fund their “overhead” slush funds which subsidizes DEI & related nonsense, NOT to actual scientific grant recipients. When private foundations make similar donations to universities, the university’s overhead rake is only 10%. That’s an insane disparity & taxpayers are left holding the bag. This is how the university DEI complex sticks the bill to Uncle Sucker. This is a great early win for @DrJBhattacharya to notch, and @DOGE will gladly help him deliver it.
Community note
X% overhead means for every $1 spent for direct costs, an extra x cents goes toward indirect costs (overhead). So .70 in indirect costs (overhead) for every dollar of direct costs—0.7/1=0.7
A rate of 70% means that 41% of the money spent goes to overhead—0.7/(0.7+1)=~41%.
freshbooks.com/hub/accounting…
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Honored to be given the chance to serve my state by providing testimony to the California State Senate Committee on Education in support of SB 1411, sponsored by @SenOchoaBogh, which would strengthen communication between K-12 and higher ed in the development of future curricular frameworks. By making sure the two communities aren’t each siloed, we strengthen alignment, which is a positive for students. Six of the seven committee members were present, and they voted unanimously to have the bill proceed. Photo below with
* Brian Conrad, Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the
Stanford Mathematics department, and
* State Senator Ochoa Bogh, Vice Chair of the Senate Committee on Education (bill sponsor)
Watch the 04/03/2024 Senate Education Committee hearing at senate.ca.gov/media-archive 1:44:30--2:01:03.
A big thanks to our deans at Berkeley, Jennifer Chayes (@BerkeleyDataSci) and Tsu-Jae King Liu (@Cal_Engineer), for bringing me into this conversation and providing this opportunity to serve our state in this way, and to @SenOchoaBogh for sponsoring this important bill. And to several individuals from both UC Berkeley and the UC Office of the President for feedback on my testimony drafts, and also a lesson on how our state's legislative process works.
(Note: my testimony only represented my own thoughts, and I was not representing campus or the UC in any of my statements. As far as I’m aware, neither has any position on this bill.)
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I’ve also been integrating LLMs into my research workflow. I spent most of Tuesday working on a problem I’ve been thinking about for a while with some collaborators. I had a conjecture on a possible way forward, and with some hours of thinking, mixing in conversations with Gemini to guide certain non-trivial calculations, Gemini ultimately spit out a proof that no approach in this family can possibly work (which I found surprising, since similar approaches worked in related settings).
Maybe will say more about what the problem is after it’s fully resolved, lest I lead to us getting scooped. :) tl;dr LLMs haven’t replaced me (yet?), but certainly are making me a more efficient researcher.
*work still ongoing*
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If 'projective geometry' is in your talk title, you should have a little fun with the slides ...
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A new strongly poly-time algo for negative-weight shortest paths, O~(m sqrt(n)) time, by my colleague Satish Rao. This is the same problem Bellman-Ford, which we teach to undergrads, solved in O(mn) 70 yrs ago.
Just 13 pgs! (*puts on todo list to read*)
arxiv.org/abs/2503.22613
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I've run high school summer camps in Ethiopia for 13 years now in which the bulk of participants come from low income families
Here's one of our students, Yosef, talking about @timnitGebru paying for his SAT+TOEFL because he couldn't afford it piped.video/gVAxqvqY8kg?si=X8HW… 2/
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sfexaminer.com/forum/put-alg…
I had seen this, but didn’t realize the author is black.
tl;dr Rex pays $ for workarounds for his granddaughter to be able to take advanced math in SF, i.e. black families finding loopholes to get around a policy to help black families.🤦🏽♂️ End the circus.
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Thought of the day: some kids were showing up to school hungry and underperforming, whereas others were well fed, so the USDA launched the School Breakfast Program to equalize the playing field. Schools didn’t say “this is unfair, so no kid is allowed to eat breakfast!”.
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This is opinion article in the @latimes by the editorial board is quite poor quality, for multiple reasons:
1) It cites a letter to the Regents by the Cal Black Engineering and Science Alumni Club making it seem like the letter supports data science over Alg 2 for equity, but the letter actually says the *exact opposite*:
"As alumni of UC Berkeley in STEM fields, our membership is acutely aware of the necessary preparation required for achieving success in any rigorous UC STEM curriculum and the necessity of preparation in Algebra II as a springboard to more
advanced mathematics courses such as Calculus. With this awareness in mind, I would like to respectfully request that the Regents consider the implications of this substitution and take steps to disallow its adoption now or in the future." (link: drive.google.com/file/d/1z0a…). Did the editorial board even read the letter?
2) The letter mentions the UC Berkeley College of Data Science, but fails to mention that the chair of the faculty committee that wrote the report recommending disapproval of these courses as Algebra 2 substitutes is the director of pedagogy for the data science major in exactly that college! Furthermore, the dean of data science in that college has repeatedly said the same (see latimes.com/opinion/story/20… and edsource.org/2024/advanced-m…), as have many other data science higher education leaders in sites.google.com/view/mathin….
3) "take a major overhaul" links to the wrong article. Did any copyeditor even check this piece?
@TeresaWatanabe
Editorial: Not every student needs algebra 2. UC should be flexible on math requirement (via @latimesopinion) latimes.com/opinion/story/20…
ALT Ventura, CA - January 16: Ventura College professor Michelle Beard teaches in her college algebra class on Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2024 in Ventura, CA. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
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Someone said something today that really resonated with me: "global warming cannot be solved by eliminating thermometers".
Indeed, and achievement gaps in education cannot be overcome by moving the goalposts.
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Between arguing that buying sex from 16 year olds shouldn't be a felony, the childhood literacy fiasco, and bills supporting dumbing down K-12 math education, I'm really having a hard time understanding what our state legislature is doing this cycle.
My latest column: Do CA Dems want to make themselves irrelevant? Bc they just tanked, again, a bill to make it a felony to purchase 16 & 17 yr olds for sex. It's getting increasingly difficult to justify their decisions that make no logical or moral sense. sfchronicle.com/opinion/emil…
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I know almost nothing about the wildfires, but the one issue I dug deep into (the recent math framework) destroyed my confidence in Newsom.
In its aftermath, people tried to fix the system to make things better for next time. Senate Bill 1412 was an anti-corruption bill that guarded against corruption and special interests when designing policy for CA K-12 education.
It was deemed so uncontroversial that it mostly flew through the legislative process on the consent calendar. When voted on the legislative floor, it was passed unanimously.
Then? Newsom vetoed it. Newsom vetoed an uncontroversial anti-corruption bill to protect K-12 education, which wouldn’t have cost the taxpayers anything. In other words, Newsom acted to protect corruption. He cannot be trusted in government.
The moment Newsom’s role as Governor of California ended.
No accountability or transparency.
What does he mean he’s wondering what happened? This is your job.
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I recently accepted an invitation to give a lecture at @SpelmanCollege. I had heard that my great grandmother Elizabeth C. Towns taught there but didn't know the details, so I contacted the Spelman College Archives and was greeted with a "welcome ... back" to Spelman 😊, and a link to the digital collection. In it, I found that my great grandma graduated class of 1909 as a winner of the "Seymour Finney Prize" for highest scholastic average amongst Spelman graduates that year. She was then hired back to Spelman just a year later in 1910, as an instructor in the "Teachers Professional Department" to train teachers -- basically a School of Education!
I mentioned in a previous tweet that Ms. Towns' son, my grandfather, married my grandmother who would go on to teach kindergarten for 52 years in Philadelphia public schools then be inducted into the National Teachers Hall of Fame.
So, I don't know...now I'm wondering whether my passions for K-12 education might be somehow encoded in my DNA via my ancestors. It's been incredible digging through history and learning more about where I came from, and God bless the Spelman College Archives for making this available.
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Yonas Bekele is a public high school student in Ethiopia, admitted to the United World Colleges with a 90% scholarship. But the 10% left (+ registration deposit) comes out to roughly 85k RMB (roughly $12k USD).
Yonas is a total stranger who emailed me, and I usually ignore such emails for several reasons (eg (1) there’s always the free option of completing school in-country, and (2) I don’t like to encourage schools to outsource their fundraising to admitted students).
In this case, unlike all the other students I get such emails from, Yonas took the unique step of putting in serious work to make money to fund the big bill. He made several 3D wooden models of the Lalibela churches and has been trying to sell them for profit, but unfortunately has run into customs issues he never predicted related to exporting “cultural heritage items”. The models are quite good — see below.
Gofundme link: gofund.me/cf9be18a
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As I look into kindergartens for my daughter next year, I've noticed every school's website emphasizes its commitment to diversity. Yet at least one such Oakland private school is ~1% black, in a city that's the birthpace of the BPP and almost a quarter black. Make it make sense.
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Terence Tao, perhaps the most famous living mathematician, explains the damage the recent grant cuts to UCLA has caused especially due to its impact on IPAM (the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, one of 6 NSF-funded math institutes in America): mathstodon.xyz/@tao/11495684…
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It dawned on me, @Stanford really needs to outsource the Boaler investigation to a neutral third party, and they need to make it clear that they are doing so. Why?
1. If the research discussed in the filed complaint can be linked as the basis of any professional development services sold to school districts by Youcubed, which is a part of Stanford, then if Stanford finds her guilty of research misconduct they may be implicating themselves in some sort of fraud related to misrepresentation of sold services.
2. Boaler holds the Nomellini-Olivier endowed chair. Angela Nomellini is a member and former Chair of the @StanfordEd Advisory Council. Her husband Ken Olivier is on the Stanford Board of Trustees. The couple are big Stanford donors, and in fact are lead donors on a major construction project for @StanfordEd: news.stanford.edu/report/202…
3. At least in recent history, she had the support of another mega philanthropist and recent Stanford Trustee Laurene Powell Jobs scottaaronson.com/cmf-docume…
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A new open letter authored by some colleagues stresses the importance of broad math education for data science, open to be signed by academic staff at California colleges/universities.
sites.google.com/view/mathin…
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WHOA. Friday, the UC submitted public comment to the State Board of Ed saying changes were coming to admissions reqs. They've now come: "BOARS, which consists of representatives from each UC campus, voted unanimously to drop data science from its math admissions standards" 1/
SCOOP: The University of California is reversing course on "data science."
A panel has voted to undo an admissions standard that faculty fear isn't preparing students for college-level math—just as it's on the cusp of being written into statewide policy. chronicle.com/article/the-un…
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