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Anil Ananthaswamy
5,237 posts
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Anil Ananthaswamy
@anilananth
Sci journalist/TED speaker/MIT KSJ Fellow/Books: The Edge of Physics, The Man Who Wasn't There, Through Two Doors at Once / Mastodon: @[email protected]
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anilananthaswamy.com
Joined April 2010
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  • Pinned
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Jun 18, 2024
    Don't know how other authors feel, but seeing the first physical copy of your book, after years of looking at Word files and PDFs... Seems surreal. It's as if someone else wrote it... Anyway, this advance copy arrived in the mail. One more month to pub date
    335K
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Dec 31, 2024
    The Theoretical Minimum (for Machine Learning)โ€ฆAnd Why Linear Algebra, Calculus, and Probability & Statistics often get mentioned as the minimum math you need to start on your machine learning journey. But why these disciplines? Hereโ€™s an intuition for why: Linear Algebra:
    96K
  • user avatar
    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Aug 25, 2025
    Sometime in Dec 2021, I got to talk to Ilya Sutskever, for my book WHY MACHINES LEARN (it was before the ChatGPT era; doubt I'd be able to do so now). Ilya said this about the math of deep learning that he encountered in the first papers he read on the subject (given to him by
    77K
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Jan 4, 2025
    The Many Moods of Machine Learning If you feel overwhelmed by the jargon of machine learning and wonder how it all ties together, you arenโ€™t alone. There's training vs test data, supervised vs unsupervised vs self-supervised learning, regression vs classification, linear vs
    52K
  • user avatar
    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Aug 9, 2024
    Imagine being ๐š๐œ๐œ๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ž๐, even in jest, of being the man who ๐˜ด๐˜ฆ๐˜ต ๐˜ฃ๐˜ข๐˜ค๐˜ฌ ๐˜ฅ๐˜ฆ๐˜ฆ๐˜ฑ ๐˜ญ๐˜ฆ๐˜ข๐˜ณ๐˜ฏ๐˜ช๐˜ฏ๐˜จ ๐˜ฃ๐˜บ ๐˜ต๐˜ธ๐˜ฐ ๐˜ฅ๐˜ฆ๐˜ค๐˜ข๐˜ฅ๐˜ฆ๐˜ด. ๐†๐ž๐จ๐ซ๐ ๐ž ๐‚๐ฒ๐›๐ž๐ง๐ค๐จ, who proved one of the seminal ๐ฎ๐ง๐ข๐ฏ๐ž๐ซ๐ฌ๐š๐ฅ ๐š๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ซ๐จ๐ฑ๐ข๐ฆ๐š๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง ๐ญ๐ก๐ž๐จ๐ซ๐ž๐ฆ๐ฌ, showed that a 1-hidden
    110K
  • user avatar
    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Aug 3, 2024
    Before one groks it, ๐ฆ๐š๐œ๐ก๐ข๐ง๐ž ๐ฅ๐ž๐š๐ซ๐ง๐ข๐ง๐  (๐Œ๐‹) can seem abstruse, even for those with software and math backgrounds (I found it so, despite having once learned the necessary skills). But once you get it, the simplicity of the conceptual building blocks is striking.
    60K
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Jan 6, 2025
    Key Resources for Deeper Dives into AI/ML A number of people have asked about the lectures/courses on AI/ML that I found useful while researching and writing WHY MACHINES LEARN. Here's a redo of an earlier post, with some additions. ๐Œ๐š๐œ๐ก๐ข๐ง๐ž ๐‹๐ž๐š๐ซ๐ง๐ข๐ง๐ 
    44K
  • user avatar
    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Jul 16, 2024
    There must be a ๐œ๐จ๐ฆ๐ฉ๐จ๐ฎ๐ง๐ ๐†๐ž๐ซ๐ฆ๐š๐ง ๐ฐ๐จ๐ซ๐ for how authors feel the day their book is released :-) Today is pub date for ๐–๐‡๐˜ ๐Œ๐€๐‚๐‡๐ˆ๐๐„๐’ ๐‹๐„๐€๐‘๐: ๐˜›๐˜ฉ๐˜ฆ ๐˜Œ๐˜ญ๐˜ฆ๐˜จ๐˜ข๐˜ฏ๐˜ต ๐˜”๐˜ข๐˜ต๐˜ฉ ๐˜‰๐˜ฆ๐˜ฉ๐˜ช๐˜ฏ๐˜ฅ ๐˜”๐˜ฐ๐˜ฅ๐˜ฆ๐˜ณn ๐˜ˆ๐˜. Nearly 4-5 yrs of work in relative obscurity sees
    53K
  • user avatar
    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Aug 21, 2024
    Sometimes, when writing a book, you encounter an idea so mind-bending, it doesn't leave you. For me, it was the answer this question: Why are deep neural networks universal function approximators? Turns out, understanding why functions are vectors is key; it's a truly eye-opening
    54K
  • user avatar
    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Dec 7, 2024
    What? Linear algebra and calculus and machine learning for the holidays! Might a math-y book be a good gift to give someone for the holidays? I hope so :-) โ€œA masterpiece.โ€ โ€”Geoffrey Hinton, 2024 Nobel Laureate and Turing Award winner โ€œAfter just a few minutes of reading Why
    41K
  • user avatar
    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Oct 26, 2024
    The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Linear Algebra. If you really want to understand whatโ€™s happening in machine learning/AI, coming to grips with the basics of linear algebra is super important. I continue to be blown away by how much of ML becomes increasingly intuitive as one
    34K
  • user avatar
    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Oct 9, 2024
    Some scientists I met and wrote about in 3 of my 4 books have won Nobel Prizes in physics after the book came out :-) The joy of writing about cutting-edge science! Not saying anything more, just in case anyone thinks otherwise. I'm trying to figure out who is most likely to win
    23K
  • user avatar
    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Oct 8, 2024
    I'm never going to get another chance for this particular humble brag, so I'll take it :-) When Geoff Hinton endorsed WHY MACHINES LEARN sometime back in March/April, my impostor syndrome came to the fore (yes, writers have it too, not just scientists). Surely not, I thought at
    20K
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    May 14, 2024
    ๐“๐ก๐ž ๐“๐ก๐ž๐จ๐ซ๐ž๐ญ๐ข๐œ๐š๐ฅ ๐Œ๐ข๐ง๐ข๐ฆ๐ฎ๐ฆโฃโฃ โฃโฃ I owe a huge debt to two books that inspired ๐–๐‡๐˜ ๐Œ๐€๐‚๐‡๐ˆ๐๐„๐’ ๐‹๐„๐€๐‘๐. Leonard Susskind's THE THEORETICAL MINIMUM (for classical mechanics) and Steven Strogatz's ๐ˆ๐๐…๐ˆ๐๐ˆ๐“๐„ ๐๐Ž๐–๐„๐‘๐’. They are different
    37K