@spmontecarlo.bsky.social - Sam Power

11 Sep 2026 12:40 +0000

connecting disparate literatures

07 Sep 2026 21:36 +0000

to be is to be perceived

07 Sep 2026 12:15 +0000

crystallisation of ideas

04 Sep 2026 08:45 +0000

Awful / True: the Wasserstein-optimal interpolation between (the uniform measures on) convex sets can induce non-convex supports in d > 1.

02 Sep 2026 08:36 +0000

Arrived at Neufchâteau-sur-Tyne for the week's workshop! Exciting times [contains quote post or other embedded content]

31 Aug 2026 10:31 +0000

It's not so surprising, but it's good to know!

30 Aug 2026 20:43 +0000

A bit interesting (as many of the contributions are): https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/08/30/care-for-a-little-more-ai/

29 Aug 2026 15:34 +0000

Learned today: let X_a be a positive stable random variable of index a, and let Y_a = log X_a. Then Y_a has a log-concave law iff a < 1/2, per a result of Thomas Simon.

26 Aug 2026 18:19 +0000

Not to be trusted [contains quote post or other embedded content]

26 Aug 2026 16:27 +0000

It's really a fascinating time for research (in maths, let's say) and kind of shocking how palpably one can feel different things changing. One could quickly understand that LLM tools really shift the floor on what sorts of calculations can now be considered "routine", as a basic example.

25 Aug 2026 20:26 +0000

Suspicious minds at Bristol Museum and Gallery.

21 Aug 2026 09:30 +0000

A small note on the "Robustness of random-walk Metropolis for steep potentials", now online at arxiv.org/abs/2608.20279. The starting point is that typical analyses of MCMC methods require structural assumptions on the negative-log-density of the target which prevent it from changing too rapidly.

20 Aug 2026 09:05 +0000

Lovely paper of Azé-Penot from 1995 on "Uniformly convex and uniformly smooth convex functions", with a few great definitions and a deluge of consequences.

18 Aug 2026 18:47 +0000

A rare original contribution to our interior decor.

17 Aug 2026 14:21 +0000

registration is still open for this workshop for another week or so - hoping to see many of you there! [contains quote post or other embedded content]

17 Aug 2026 11:00 +0000

Some updates: [contains quote post or other embedded content]

10 Aug 2026 17:32 +0000

diagrams-in-progress

03 Aug 2026 20:53 +0000

Back in my "watching Simons Institute live-streams" era (https://www.youtube.com/@SimonsInstitute). Very influential on me as a curious PhD student, influential once more as a guy with some free time in the summer!

01 Aug 2026 20:26 +0000

Always interesting to see the different responses to the various items of maths news as they come out. I feel like I find it important to keep reminding myself that even for fairly proximate fields to mine within maths, there are lots of internal cultural aspects on which I'm not well-informed.

30 Jul 2026 20:06 +0000

Just to give some context: let F be a function that is reasonably continuous but not quite Lipschitz (e.g. Hölder cts). Then, define F_t (x) = sup { F(y) - t || x - y|| }. Then F_t is t-Lipschitz, and pointwise, F(x) < F_t (x) < F(x) + c_t for some constant offset c_t. [contains quote post or other embedded content]

29 Jul 2026 23:38 +0000

Unfortunate / interesting:

28 Jul 2026 20:59 +0000

Registration is now open for this workshop! website: https://sites.google.com/view/newcastle-non-equilibrium-samp/home registration: https://webstore.ncl.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/faculty-of-science-agriculture-engineering/mathematics-statistics-and-physics/non-equilibrium-sampling-diffusionsflowsparticles [contains quote post or other embedded content]

25 Jul 2026 11:09 +0000

Lots of interesting bits and pieces cropping up in (what I've encountered of) Tao's ICM talk. I do find that this aspect of 'digestion' of mathematics is generally quite exciting to me, particularly in terms of revisiting established work. (I do understand why it's less lucrative in the short term)

24 Jul 2026 21:27 +0000

A pair of notes which review and optimise a couple of fun (and by now, reasonably well-established) techniques for showing the 'contraction-on-average' property for stochastic systems, focusing on problems for which the 'obvious' metrics do not contract. (links below)

23 Jul 2026 16:34 +0000

The semi-answer one can also give here is that many of them were also interested in entropy - though often a different entropy in each case! [contains quote post or other embedded content]

22 Jul 2026 21:35 +0000

The connection: despite working in dramatically different areas of mathematics, all had sufficient overlap with the work of A.N. Kolmogorov that they contributed to an obituary volume reviewing his contributions to their area. [contains quote post or other embedded content]

22 Jul 2026 15:06 +0000

a fun trivia: what connects these mathematicians?

18 Jul 2026 19:00 +0000

Oh very cool

16 Jul 2026 13:19 +0000

(presumably) late to the game, but have been reading a little bit about { Proof Theory / Proof Mining / Skolemization } this afternoon, which has been sort of interesting, especially as someone with a bit of a taste for quantitative results and so on.

15 Jul 2026 17:55 +0000

very fun