Foreword from the future

As 2025 is coming to an end… I’ve been reading over some of my old posts. The tone here is obviously on the more polemic side, but it would be a disservice to my former self to erase the record of my views on academia when I was on the inside.

I think it’s worthwhile to conserve not just the more reasoned and polished version of “why did you leave academia” — that I now often find myself regurgitating — but also conserving the “emotion” behind that decision.

Because any after the fact rationalization aside, the fundamental decision wasn’t rational, it was emotional. Experienced. Not up for argument. It was an incommensurable experience of a normal science that wasn’t suited to my taste. It was the observation of the fundamental sin in the heart of academia as an institution.

If nothing else, then as a warning to my future self to never make the fault of Epimetheus again. Before Newtons birthday seems an apt time to spit on the grave of the enlightenment. So /spit, cheers, and onward!

I’ve been wanting to write something terse, dense, with academic heft on this subject a long time. Sadly, I fear I’ll never write such a thing. But I need to speak my heart. I left the mathematical asylum, but I need some closure, and eating Curry isn’t cutting it anymore.

Grigori Perelman rejected the fields medal, and the Clay Institute awarded monetary prize for solving one of the “Millenium Problems”. Evariste Galois laid dormant for 10 years after his death in the drawers of Liouville. Gauss and Newton let their personal quibbles turn into abuse of power. Grothendieck left the whole thing behind, burned all his papers. Kaczynski became a domestic terrorist. Lovely field indeed!

I’m not interested in money or fame; I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.

– Grigori Perelman

The QED project is but ruins — visions of better times. If the proof isn’t surveyable, then it isn’t solvable! Mathematics isn’t just syntactics, no, they’re new age incarnations on the platonic plane of ideas, they’re universal truths of the universe!… Nonsense.

Mathematics is circlejerking on tautological systems.

Lockhart can lament all he wants, at least in primary school the problems are trivial, and if you’re done fast you can do something actually useful with the research stipend called public school. At the prestigious academy, the queen of sciences is growing ever more complicated year by year… but ironically, the material taught is the perfect problems for proof systems, we’re teaching students only to replicate. Since the primary concern of these problems is less work for the validator, the true test of your “learning outcome” is your ability to solve solved problems systematically. We must preserve the human validator, by turning said human into a mistaken mockery of the computer.

Science, knowledge, the university itself. Open is its doors to any and all. Come research for Boeing and Lockheed, at the faculty of partitioning of 7 hole toruses by means of ballistics, or if it feels too theoretical to indirectly maim and kill people in foreign countries, why not study applied mathematics, and develop social models for companies like Palantir? Profiling, what’s that? Do you not believe in the infallible probabilities?

“We need a new Bourbaki” we young people may say to each other, but we all know well that we’d rather get ours and leave this corpse rotting and dying. If anything, what’s needed isn’t more fuel on the fire. Institutional science is systematically pissing in the super soaker wielded by various tyrants, profiteers and oligarchies around the planar graph we all live on. If we are to change mathematics, we should get to the roots of the problem, like we have always done. The foundation on which we built has a crisis, and that foundation isn’t mathematical, it’s social.

And for myself, for my mathematical circlejerking?

I keep it between friends, private, like good sex. The smut we produce we encrypt and keep safe so as to not show something profane to the plutocrats of the academy. Encrypting — hoping to be kept in those drawers until saner heads emerge to open it.