Delighted that my friend and colleague Alex Bellos has been awarded the 2026 Christopher Zeeman medal for communicating mathematics. Well done Alex. Here we are at the recent opening of Maths World in London alongside the excellent Alexander Masters.
So, we know Phelps is the gold medals guy, but I like to say that transport is full of silver medals, right? A lot of people think about ride sharing as a gold medal. What about food delivery? What about parcel delivery?
But then you actually sit down and do the maths, and then for most people if you just skip one burger per month, that compensates the, the CO2 output, or, like, the water use in equivalent of tokens.
Breakneck by Dan Wang takes you on a fascinating journey through China's engineering state, juxtaposing it against America's lawyerly society in an effort to reveal what each country should learn from the other. I've been a keen reader of Dan's personal blog for many years and am delighted to report that this book, his first, features everything I love most about his writing: his unbounded curiosity, thoughtful analysis, compelling storytelling, self-awareness, offbeat sense of humor, and insights born of lived experience.
What I meant to say is that language math and coding and especially math and coding suggests that whatever it is that makes people good at learning is probably not so much a complicated prior but something more some fundamental thing.
Yeah. I still think math is essential. It's something that shapes your brain, it teaches you to rely on your logical thinking to split big problems into smaller parts, put them in the right sequence, solve them patiently, trying again if it doesn't work.
And the important thing to say is that no matter how you want the model to behave, these RLHF and preference-tuning techniques also improve performance. So, on things like math evals and code evals, there is something innate to these, what is called contrastive loss functions.
Michael Brooks, The Art of More – The history of how ideas in mathematics (such as algebra, geometry, statistics and accountancy) helped to shape the modern world. Given my own predelictions I was delighted with this book.
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