Michael Barany
@mbarany.com
Historical and cultural theories about maths and science theories. Fields Medal killjoy. Scotland enjoyer. formerly @mbarany on birdsite and intermittently @[email protected] on fediverse
Pinned
Michael Barany
@mbarany.com
· Apr 17
Reading Between the Lines in the Barany Lab: Lessons on Written and Unwritten Science and Mathematics - International Journal of Peptide Research and Therapeutics
Purpose I reflect on my childhood experiences in the Barany Lab and connect them to several findings and themes from my subsequent career researching the history and culture of science and mathematics...
doi.org
I wrote a little essay in honor of my dad's retirement, "Reading Between the Lines in the Barany Lab" (open access) doi.org/10.1007/s109...
Reposted by Michael Barany
The fragility of senior managers as they literally destroy whole careers and fields of study has really been something to behold. Is it hot in that kitchen?
It’s an interesting thought experiment, isn’t it? Can an employee bully the most senior of senior managers? Doesn’t the power differential preclude this? Perhaps they did not pay attention when taught the only effective protest - or comedy - is when you punch up? 🎭 Or they didn’t do an arts subject.
October 1, 2026 at 9:06 AM
The fragility of senior managers as they literally destroy whole careers and fields of study has really been something to behold. Is it hot in that kitchen?
I do appreciate that our principal is very responsive to emails on his iphone, wish I could say this was out of character from his Outlook for iOS
It certainly seems that dignity and respect are qualities that only apply in some directions (as seen in this email exchange shared in the student staff assembly)
October 1, 2026 at 9:08 AM
I do appreciate that our principal is very responsive to emails on his iphone, wish I could say this was out of character from his Outlook for iOS
Reposted by Michael Barany
Still it’s good to see the Dignity and Respect policy applies to someone in a university. Because things it lists - Transparency! Communication! Responsiveness! Have been very short in supply the past few years. Weaponising it is exactly the tone deafness that is making us all rage. 🧐
October 1, 2026 at 7:15 AM
Still it’s good to see the Dignity and Respect policy applies to someone in a university. Because things it lists - Transparency! Communication! Responsiveness! Have been very short in supply the past few years. Weaponising it is exactly the tone deafness that is making us all rage. 🧐
Reposted by Michael Barany
I haven’t said anything about the strikes yet (I am so ANGRY but despite all my rage I’m still just a rat in a cage etc etc). So it can’t be me the carefully worded HR email is about, telling us all to be nice to everyone (implying SMT?) including on socials, on threat of disciplinary action?
October 1, 2026 at 7:08 AM
I haven’t said anything about the strikes yet (I am so ANGRY but despite all my rage I’m still just a rat in a cage etc etc). So it can’t be me the carefully worded HR email is about, telling us all to be nice to everyone (implying SMT?) including on socials, on threat of disciplinary action?
Reposted by Michael Barany
the rest of us also respect students enough as adults capable of comprehending complex issues not to say stuff like this:
September 29, 2026 at 7:24 AM
the rest of us also respect students enough as adults capable of comprehending complex issues not to say stuff like this:
Reposted by Michael Barany
Cuts like those proposed at Edinburgh are cultural vandalism, & the destruction of future opportunities for countless students.
Pitting students and staff against each other is callous disregard for the immense work that teaching staff put into educating & encouraging young people.
Pitting students and staff against each other is callous disregard for the immense work that teaching staff put into educating & encouraging young people.
September 28, 2026 at 11:16 AM
Cuts like those proposed at Edinburgh are cultural vandalism, & the destruction of future opportunities for countless students.
Pitting students and staff against each other is callous disregard for the immense work that teaching staff put into educating & encouraging young people.
Pitting students and staff against each other is callous disregard for the immense work that teaching staff put into educating & encouraging young people.
Reposted by Michael Barany
Really galling that the Principal accuses staff of ‘weaponising’ students when the revealed preference of the University’s management has consistently been that they prioritise breaking the union over things avoiding students graduating with empty pieces of paper.
Accusing striking staff of 'weaponising students' ignores the extent to which students have ALREADY become nothing but £££ signs for a University management depriving generations of future students of much more than 5 weeks of teaching.
September 28, 2026 at 7:31 PM
Really galling that the Principal accuses staff of ‘weaponising’ students when the revealed preference of the University’s management has consistently been that they prioritise breaking the union over things avoiding students graduating with empty pieces of paper.
Reposted by Michael Barany
Being a global university should not mean becoming less Scottish
www.thenational.scot/culture/2658...
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www.thenational.scot/culture/2658...
Subscribe to National app here: www.thenational.scot/subscribe/
Being a global university should not mean becoming less Scottish
A UNIVERSITY can tell you a great deal about the country around it, not only through what it teaches, but through what it decides is worth keeping,…
www.thenational.scot
September 29, 2026 at 2:49 AM
Being a global university should not mean becoming less Scottish
www.thenational.scot/culture/2658...
Subscribe to National app here: www.thenational.scot/subscribe/
www.thenational.scot/culture/2658...
Subscribe to National app here: www.thenational.scot/subscribe/
Reposted by Michael Barany
Best of luck to @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social members going on strike for over a month. Nobody does this willingly - it’s a last resort, unlike that enormously rich university’s slash and burn tactics.
September 28, 2026 at 8:11 AM
Best of luck to @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social members going on strike for over a month. Nobody does this willingly - it’s a last resort, unlike that enormously rich university’s slash and burn tactics.
Reposted by Michael Barany
Cannot tell you how much I hate this & how ashamed & angry I am that @ukri.org have taken this step. We KNOW this sort of gAI is socially biased, we KNOW it favours slopAI output over human-written. Our research landscape is falling apart due to underfunding, & they do this? it's *appalling*
Had a UKRI funded grant proposal rejected at the "AI triage stage". "This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review." 🧪 #academicsky
September 25, 2026 at 7:53 AM
Cannot tell you how much I hate this & how ashamed & angry I am that @ukri.org have taken this step. We KNOW this sort of gAI is socially biased, we KNOW it favours slopAI output over human-written. Our research landscape is falling apart due to underfunding, & they do this? it's *appalling*
Reposted by Michael Barany
I've seen the future and it's bleak. Coming to an inbox near you soon too I imagine. I don't use LLMs for anything I do and never will but it's depressing that I wrote something that no one ever read before it was rejected. 🧪 #academicsky
September 24, 2026 at 9:13 AM
I've seen the future and it's bleak. Coming to an inbox near you soon too I imagine. I don't use LLMs for anything I do and never will but it's depressing that I wrote something that no one ever read before it was rejected. 🧪 #academicsky
Work Gets Hard When Context Is Everywhere
Also, just resharing this as it is the funniest bit of made-up AI language - it's referring to the hot mess of whatsapps and emails and notes and calendar invitations, which we all ofc refer to as "context"
September 24, 2026 at 10:09 AM
Work Gets Hard When Context Is Everywhere
Reposted by Michael Barany
Back of the envelope calculations: 3600 years of research time went into the collective application process. The research will fund 3200 years of research. We are 400 research years poorer as a result of this. 1/2
Alter. 21627 Einreichungen auf ein Fellowship-Programm. Wer soll das alles begutachten? 😶🌫️ Wer jetzt nicht für mehr Grundförderung und weniger Drittmittel argumentiert, der ist doch nicht gescheit.
September 21, 2026 at 8:02 AM
Back of the envelope calculations: 3600 years of research time went into the collective application process. The research will fund 3200 years of research. We are 400 research years poorer as a result of this. 1/2
Reposted by Michael Barany
Another win for the Cornell Chronicle’s email subject line policy of “jam the top two headlines together and hit send.”
September 22, 2026 at 8:05 PM
Another win for the Cornell Chronicle’s email subject line policy of “jam the top two headlines together and hit send.”
Reposted by Michael Barany
I know mathematicians aren't big on methods from other disciplines, but I feel like comparatists would have a field day examining this and e.g. the Leiden declaration
Initial Members of the Advisory Group on Mathematics and AI:
Camillo De Lellis (IAS)
Timothy Gowers (Cambridge)
Martin Hairer (EPFL)
Nikhil Srivastava (Berkeley)
Ulrike Tillmann (Oxford)
Ravi Vakil (Stanford)
Edward Witten (IAS)
Melanie Matchett Wood (Harvard) terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/21/a...
Camillo De Lellis (IAS)
Timothy Gowers (Cambridge)
Martin Hairer (EPFL)
Nikhil Srivastava (Berkeley)
Ulrike Tillmann (Oxford)
Ravi Vakil (Stanford)
Edward Witten (IAS)
Melanie Matchett Wood (Harvard) terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/21/a...
Announcing the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
[This is a guest post by the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] We would …
terrytao.wordpress.com
September 22, 2026 at 3:43 AM
I know mathematicians aren't big on methods from other disciplines, but I feel like comparatists would have a field day examining this and e.g. the Leiden declaration
ok but some of the chickens have a prize they won a long time ago for stuff completely unrelated to fox management, so we have to trust them on this
Wow does the post title bury the lede! I particularly like the pictured comment.
September 22, 2026 at 4:43 AM
ok but some of the chickens have a prize they won a long time ago for stuff completely unrelated to fox management, so we have to trust them on this
Reposted by Michael Barany
Wow does the post title bury the lede! I particularly like the pictured comment.
September 22, 2026 at 12:09 AM
Wow does the post title bury the lede! I particularly like the pictured comment.
finding out that supposedly-crisis-budget-cutting uni has budgeted £500/yr in tokens for 3rd-party ai models for every academic and i-don't-know-how-much for students, and this is presented as cost-control after who-knows-how-much being burnt on this stuff previously
September 21, 2026 at 12:43 PM
finding out that supposedly-crisis-budget-cutting uni has budgeted £500/yr in tokens for 3rd-party ai models for every academic and i-don't-know-how-much for students, and this is presented as cost-control after who-knows-how-much being burnt on this stuff previously
Reposted by Michael Barany
We have a higher ed system that is premised on the idea that incoming undergraduates have basic reading, writing, study, and math skills which will allow them to learn how to understand research knowledge and ideally eventually generate themselves.
September 20, 2026 at 9:34 PM
We have a higher ed system that is premised on the idea that incoming undergraduates have basic reading, writing, study, and math skills which will allow them to learn how to understand research knowledge and ideally eventually generate themselves.
Reposted by Michael Barany
We’ve lived through the nearly complete systematic unwinding of the postwar public university, which for all its faults, was premised on the idea that not only aristocrats could be intellectuals, & that having non-aristocratic intellectuals was better for knowledge & therefore better for everyone
We are getting dangerously close to a point when the only people who are able to stay in academia are those who have enough independent wealth to keep going indefinitely as independent scholars.
We really need a comprehensive (government funding bodies, charitable funders, universities, learned societies and ECRs) summit and plan for maintaining postdoctoral pipelines AND not letting the crises simply re-inscribe extant inequalities in the system.
September 20, 2026 at 9:04 PM
We’ve lived through the nearly complete systematic unwinding of the postwar public university, which for all its faults, was premised on the idea that not only aristocrats could be intellectuals, & that having non-aristocratic intellectuals was better for knowledge & therefore better for everyone
not only this, but such thinking is financially sustainable at universities at a scale that works, provided you're not setting out to engineer a budget narrative toward academic vandalism
But what if I told you that thinking isn't always efficient and that learning demands grappling with complex ideas in smaller groups, so you can't just "scale up" something like a course on advanced Arabic or Hegel or Feminist hermeneutics of testimony without losing the learning itself.
September 20, 2026 at 11:24 AM
not only this, but such thinking is financially sustainable at universities at a scale that works, provided you're not setting out to engineer a budget narrative toward academic vandalism
Reposted by Michael Barany
But what if I told you that thinking isn't always efficient and that learning demands grappling with complex ideas in smaller groups, so you can't just "scale up" something like a course on advanced Arabic or Hegel or Feminist hermeneutics of testimony without losing the learning itself.
September 19, 2026 at 2:14 PM
But what if I told you that thinking isn't always efficient and that learning demands grappling with complex ideas in smaller groups, so you can't just "scale up" something like a course on advanced Arabic or Hegel or Feminist hermeneutics of testimony without losing the learning itself.
Reposted by Michael Barany
Same thing happening at Edinburgh Uni to programmes in history, the arts, Celtic studies and more. Edinburgh is known for having one of the best humanities programmes in UK and world for research and teaching. We also more than pay for ourselves but with consultants, you can always be more efficient
September 19, 2026 at 2:13 PM
Same thing happening at Edinburgh Uni to programmes in history, the arts, Celtic studies and more. Edinburgh is known for having one of the best humanities programmes in UK and world for research and teaching. We also more than pay for ourselves but with consultants, you can always be more efficient
Reposted by Michael Barany
For those asking: www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/...
September 19, 2026 at 2:19 PM
For those asking: www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/...
Reposted by Michael Barany
A few facts. 1) Humanities programmes, despite what you may assume, actually make money for the university and don't lose it. 2) we aren't in a deficit as university and have had a multimillion pound surplus every year.
September 19, 2026 at 2:30 PM
A few facts. 1) Humanities programmes, despite what you may assume, actually make money for the university and don't lose it. 2) we aren't in a deficit as university and have had a multimillion pound surplus every year.