You're just a lowly Cheddar Monk / Always running out of tricks

also two weeks ago I had an original post crack four-digit-notes-count for the first time ever (yes the leverage one)

and now i want to see who’s booping me so I think i’m just gonna give up on trying to backread notifications for the entire month of march.

[edit September 2024: I am sometimes checking notifications now but May Lapse Again]

AO3 Top 250 Fandom Tags

These data tables show the top 250 canonical fandom tags on Archive of Our Own, ranked by the total number of public non-subtag works.

This isn't a criticism of the work above, but I think understanding tag trees and their foibles gives you a better understanding of comparisons like this -- and puts some things in perspective. For example, RPF as a tag in its own right doesn't have that many uses, but it has MANY subtags, and in the agregate they're over 900k public works. Considered as an aggregate**, RPF is bigger than Marvel or Harry Potter. I think this explains the discourse I see about it (moreso on Reddit or IRL than here on Tumblr, to be fair) -- yes, it's controversial, but it's also even more prevalent on AO3 than the "big" fandoms, so much easier for people to encounter by accident while looking for something else.

*(I don't know how to get the "synonyms but not subtags" count for the tag "Real Person Fiction", because it has at least 10 bigger subtags, but it's fewer than "Life Series | 3rd Life SMP Series" at 29388" looking at the filterbox here)

Like, if you're into Formula One, you might not care about other sports RPF fandoms, or any music fandoms or historical RPF. It would be ridiculous to say your fandom is the biggest one on AO3. "All of RPF" isn't your fandom!

But for people who aren't into RPF at all and it turns up incidentally while they're searching for other things, the distinction probably matters less. And since there's three times as much of it as Harry Potter, it's probably turning up incidentally in people's searches pretty frequently!

AO3 Top 250 Fandom Tags

These data tables show the top 250 canonical fandom tags on Archive of Our Own, ranked by the total number of public non-subtag works.

This isn't a criticism of the work above, but I think understanding tag trees and their foibles gives you a better understanding of comparisons like this -- and puts some things in perspective. For example, RPF as a tag in its own right doesn't have that many uses, but it has MANY subtags, and in the agregate they're over 900k public works. Considered as an aggregate**, RPF is bigger than Marvel or Harry Potter. I think this explains the discourse I see about it (moreso on Reddit or IRL than here on Tumblr, to be fair) -- yes, it's controversial, but it's also even more prevalent on AO3 than the "big" fandoms, so much easier for people to encounter by accident while looking for something else.

*(I don't know how to get the "synonyms but not subtags" count for the tag "Real Person Fiction", because it has at least 10 bigger subtags, but it's fewer than "Life Series | 3rd Life SMP Series" at 29388" looking at the filterbox here)

I took the cargo ops class at school but my teacher explained that it doesn't give a certification and I'd only be okay for ship's crane and the school forklifts. she said I could take an online exam and get my cert. I paid 60 bucks.

I'm googling and I'm seeing a lot of resources saying that the online programs cover the classroom part of the exam but not the in person practical aspect.

29 CFR 1910.178 (l)(2)(ii)

<3

Really what makes the underlying plot credible to me, even if I have many details to nitpick, is that Catherine, unlike most people who believe they are the next Ramanujan, is a second-generation mathematician who was close to her father, a UChicago professor, who would have shaped her mathematical taste in ways that would help her find problems that are both of interest to the research mathematical community and accessible to a relative outsider. (Indeed, very recently UChicago professor Akhil Mathew has been succesful at pointing LLM reasoning models to such problems, though the strengths of LLMs are very different from someone like Catherine's.) And Catherine would be part of the long tradition of second-generation women mathematicians, going back to Hypatia, Alicia Boole Stott, and Emmy Noether. Her father would also have taught her to be critical of her own work in ways that most people who claim proofs of famous results do -- and I think that tendency to self-criticism is reflected by the depression she's in at the start of the play -- while her father's example would also have inspired the self-confidence in her that allowed her to start in the first place. And she could plausibly have had access to the UChicago library as well as her father's personal mathematical library, though people would assume that she was checking out books on behalf of her father. Also as a mathematician's daughter she'd be more likely to have opportunities to learn college-level math in high school through acceleration/summer programs/etc. Indeed, a friend of mine attended a summer program for women in math where it turned out that almost everyone had a mathematician parent.

Unfortunately David Auburn does not have the mathematical maturity to write the dialogue plausibly for this, so the characters talk mostly number theory trivia. Though something with more mathematical depth would probably go over the head of everyone in the audience except the one person who is so nerdsniped they are distracted for the rest of the play :-D I do think it's good that he doesn't specify the problem that was solved -- he easily could have said that Catherine proved the infinitude of Sophie Germain primes, he already did the exposition for that, but he doesn't. Though it's actually plausible that Catherine's result was in that direction -- Yitang Zhang's result on bounded gaps between primes is remarkable as an example (it built on work of Goldston-Pintz-Yıldırım from the early 2000s, but one could massage the timeline) -- and one of the most impressive papers I've seen written by a high schooler is the work on the distribution of Carmichael numbers by Daniel Larsen, also from a mathematical family.

HAL. That was last week. I spent this week reading the proof. I think I understand it, more or less. It uses a lot of newer mathematical techniques, things that were developed in the last decade. Elliptic curves. Modular forms. I think I learned more mathematics this week than I did in four years of grad school.

OK, first of all, that last sentence is clearly hyperbole. No matter how brilliant the proof you're reading or what substances you're on, math takes time to digest, and there's only so much you can learn in a week, while on the other hand the UChicago math grad program is pretty demanding. (You do get faster at learning math as you go on, but still.) The name-dropping of elliptic curves and modular forms is a reference to Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem (announced in 1993 and published in 1995) which was fresh in the public consciousness at the time Proof came out due to the 1997 PBS Nova documentary (linking the website partly just because it is a charming time capsule of the 90's internet). The basic idea that the proof can't be Robert's because it's using techniques developed after he lost his mind is reasonable -- but elliptic curves and modular forms just aren't that new! In their modern form they date to the early 20th century, though they are grounded in 19th century mathematics (and, for elliptic curves, the work of Diophantus), and there was active research on these topics (and connections between them) throughout the second half of the 20th century -- they may not have been as trendy as it was post-Wiles but they were being studied by good people at top places. Wiles's proof of Fermat's last theorem proved a conjecture relating elliptic curves to modular forms that dated from the 1950s, which thanks to research done in the early 1980s was known to imply Fermat's last theorem. If you wanted , in the late 90's to talk about the aspects of Wiles's proof that were truly cutting-edge, you'd say something about "modularity lifting of Galois representations" or "patching". Of course this is a bit unfair of me to ask a playwright to be on top of mathematical trends and buzzwords. But I also think that Catherine (or Robert, for that matter) probably couldn't have written something like Wiles's proof -- it builds on a lot of existing theory, and is in a field where it's particularly hard for newcomers to make progress without extensive mentorship. Wiles was able to do it both because he was brilliant and because he'd spent his whole career working on this sort of thing; I'm not sure that many other people could. A math PhD in a related field who wants to read Wiles's proof might actually need to learn more math than they did in graduate school. There's an ongoing project to formalize the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem (taking some shortcuts) which has been going since 2024 and is still nowhere near done.