David Bessis (@davidbessis) / X

David Bessis

8,087 posts

David Bessis

@davidbessis

Rogue mathematician. "The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding." — Bill Thurston davidbessis.substack.com

amazon.com/Mathematica-Se…

Joined January 2012

Pinned
David Bessis
@davidbessis
Feb 17
Replying to @davidbessis
I do not think "all intellectual labor will done", but I do think that AI will cause major disruptions. There's always been good and bad reasons to engage in intellectual work, and AI will make the bad reasons infinitely worse. davidbessis.substack.com/p/letter-to-a-…
50K
David Bessis
@davidbessis
Feb 7, 2025
Mathematicians: math talent isn't innate Neuroscientists: math talent isn't innate. Geneticists: math talent isn't innate. Old-school psychologists running mathematically flawed models on twins & IQ: math talent is innate because our models say so.
569K
David Bessis
@davidbessis
Jul 25, 2024
A simple math proof that math talent isn’t primarily driven by genetics. ⤵️
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David Bessis
@davidbessis
Oct 24, 2024
How I woke up one day and decided to solve a math conjecture from the 1970s ⤵️
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David Bessis
@davidbessis
Jul 16, 2024
My most ambitious post ever: we've been *wrong* about math for 2300 years and I’m going to *fix this* in a single Twitter thread.
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David Bessis
@davidbessis
Jan 9, 2025
Philosophers: logic is the foundation of mathematics. Mathematicians:
This post is unavailable.
118K
David Bessis
@davidbessis
Sep 26, 2024
This Grothendieck quote is the best-kept secret about mathematics: Always start with your naive intuition, even if it’s plainly dumb, and then refine it by asking a barrage of “stupid” questions. Waiting in silence until you “get it right” will only lead to paralysis.
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David Bessis
@davidbessis
Aug 7, 2024
Replying to @davidbessis
The #1 reason why we fail to teach math: we present it as knowledge without telling kids it's a motor skill developed by practicing unseen actions in your head. Passive listening is useless, yet we never say it. We’re basically asking kids to take notes during yoga lessons.
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David Bessis
@davidbessis
Aug 7, 2024
Why you don't understand math — and what you can do about it. ⤵️
331K
David Bessis
@davidbessis
Mar 14, 2025
This speech is a disgrace. As a young mathematician, I stopped talking with my physicist friends for the same exact reason: their reply to all my questions was always: "no, no, don't try to understand it intuitively." Nothing is counterintuitive by nature, unless you decide so.
This post is unavailable.
308K
David Bessis
@davidbessis
Mar 8, 2025
Even math is infiltrated by far-left politics! I did a search on the math arXiv and discovered that Terence Tao has written 18 articles involving "inequality" in the title or abstract. Truly shocking!!!
~~datahazard~~
@fentasyl
Mar 8, 2025
$610,000,000 of Health Science projects funded by the National Cancer Institute include far-left political/DEI language like "latinx" -- 11% of Cancer awards by dollars $315,000,000 of those by the National Inst on Minority Health & Health Disparities -- a whopping 48% of theirs
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David Bessis
@davidbessis
Sep 16, 2025
A corollary of the No Free Lunch Theorem for cognitive development is that writing is hard, and it should be.⤵️
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David Bessis
@davidbessis
Dec 12, 2024
Most savage math paper ever. Would kill to publish something like this.
83K
David Bessis
@davidbessis
Feb 6, 2025
Non-mathematicians are deeply delusional about mathematicians. They vastly underestimate the incredible amount of first-hand, practical knowledge about the inner workings of human cognition that one must acquire to put oneself in the position of solving a major conjecture.
Teortaxes▶️ (DeepSeek 推特🐋铁粉 2023 – ∞)
@teortaxesTex
Feb 5, 2025
Mathematicians are deeply delusional about normal humans
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