Steve McCormick

New postdoc position advertised in geometric analysis (and/or math-GR) with me in the frozen wastelands of the north (Luleå, Sweden)

web103.reachmee.com/ext/I003/583...

What the hell...

Is there any distinction between the different papers? Like a majority are surely not showing any intellectual independence, right?

Lol brings back memories.
I do still actually check it occasionally, but never even make eye contact with the crazies. Occasionally it reminds me of a paper I wanted to read though

Okay, now I’ve found their “Bagpipe Practice Room” I think Scotrail might just be having us on!

(I found a call due very soon promoting internationalisation to recruit someone from outside Europe with less than 2 years on the post-PhD clock but not sure I can come up with a candidate quick enough)

Anyone in the math GR / geometric analysis communiy know anyone who's in need of a postdoc around 1 year from now and would be interested in coming to the frozen wastelands of the north? (And has/will have a non-Euro PhD)

ChatGPT correctly guesses who I am

I asked ChatGPT if it knew who I am based off of our chats. The answer was (obviously) yes 😅

If kids’ schools trained them for work based on what everyone thought the hot new technology was going to be, both my kids would have spent the past several years learning about the blockchain. This is why schools don’t attempt to do workplace training: life is pretty long.

A last little bit of swedish summer yesterday

Guitar and some beers, spotted some berries, and then made a little spiky friend

For the math folks on here: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant. www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

Some kind of joke related to observing/measuring the back of the poster?

A friend is currently advertising a PhD position in harmonic analysis (Melbourne + Chennai*): lashi-bandara.github.io/toc/supervis...

Pass it on if you know anyone who might be interested.

* Position is joint between Deakin University IIT-Madras, with 3 years in Melbourne and 1 year in Chennai

Photo of Tom Lehrer

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

I say "attempt" because admittedly, I still don't really understand it all too well but seems we can prove stuff about it.

We were however able to show that the quantity arises as the value of a reduced Hamiltonian for the Einstein equations, which I think is kind of neat

Recently, we (with Mattias Dahl and Klaus Kröncke) gave a definition of a new geometric "mass-like" invariant for asymptotically (locally) hyperbolic manifolds, which we've found satisfies some interesting properties.

This paper is our attempt to understand it a little better.

The Volume-Renormalized Mass from a Hamiltonian Perspective We demonstrate that the volume-renormalized mass for asymptotically hyperbolic manifolds recently introduced by the authors can be deduced from a reduced Hamiltonian perspective. In order to do this, ...

New paper day! 🥳
arxiv.org/abs/2506.11841

I'm told that when I was really little, I was running into the motion sensor to open the door of a store before arriving customers triggered it

When I was visibly upset for being too slow, a group stepped back and let the door close again so I could "open it" for them -- it was the band Wet Wet Wet

Seems arXiv now uses AI to try to convince you that you're misclassifying your own paper's subject area 🙃

[Disclaimer: Not any kind of expert, so I'm probably missing things but the gist is roughly right I think 😅 ]

The amusing thing is that there *is* an etymological connection here... And of course some variation of calling townspeople "burgers" exists in almost all European languages. It's where "bourgeois" comes from even. And connected to place names like Hamburg, Edinburgh, Strasbourg, etc. (I think)

Constraints are not enough The Euclidean Einstein-Hilbert action is well-known to be unbounded below and thus to raise many questions regarding the definition of the gravitational path integral. A variety of works since the lat...

Can any physicist explain this idea of boundedness of the Euclidean Einstein-Hilbert action in the context of this paper? (Purely from a GR/geometric perspective, no path integrals)

arxiv.org/abs/2505.13600

Not only is this true, there are 33 whole-ass mentions of this in the script and each one is freaking hilarious

whills.nu/4/sw4.html#h...

Just got some art done by Alexandr Elichev for my latest homebrew Frosthaven class and wanted to share it somewhere :)

How normal is it to write words correctly, but write the letters in the wrong order?

Sometimes when I write fast, I fill in the letters the wrong way. Eg. When writing "Letter" in the middle of a sentence I might write the "ett" then the "L" in front of them and then the "er"

... it feels weird

Yeh, it's not even the AI that's the problem -- I actually *do* even think that we aren't that far from being able to generate tools to help prove things.

But they seem to think that essentially papermilling is a goal...

How can you look at a shift to quantity over quality seen in other fields, and think "math really needs to do this too"

Well this can fuck right off

www.theregister.com/2025/04/27/d...

Photo of Senator Chris Van Hollen with Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.

de Sitter xkcd.com/3077

A light blue diagram depicting the sea, with the water's surface at the top, and just below it is an outline of the Mary Rose, with the depth (12m, 40ft or 6.7 fathoms). There is a line showing the seabed, which takes a rapid dive into the vertical...

On the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, we thought we'd answer a question that's often asked,

"If they raised the Mary Rose, why not raise the Titanic?"

Allow our scaled diagram to explain...