mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Professor of Mathematics at UCLA and External Professor at Santa Fe Institute.
I am an applied mathematician (and occasional physicist) who studies networks, complex systems, nonlinear systems, and their applications.
Career update:
I am leaving the US and returning to Europe!
Nordita (Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics; https://nordita.org), in concert with the Department of Mathematics at Stockholm University, created a faculty position for me with help from a bunch of funding from Wallenberg. For 10 years, this will be a 90% research position. After that (unless some further funding comes later), it will become a standard research/teaching position in mathematics at SU.
I was just playing around with the label spacing of a figure.
The \latex commands were spacing things (including with centering) based on Euclidean distance, whereas I was gravitating aesthetically — with respect to what I viewed as naturally 'centered' — on arclength distance. That's why I felt that certain things looked off-center and hence botheed me.
Apparently my eyes gravitate to an intrinsic notion of distance. I'd like to think that my differential-geometry professors would be proud. 🙂
ChatGPT had a triangle fail.
Even with arXiv administrators having supposedly turned off my ability to endorse anybody (which I felt the need to do from so many complete strangers requesting me to endorse them all of a sudden), I am still getting endorsement requests from strangers once a week. At least it's not daily anymore. I was suddenly getting daily requests for two weeks.
Hopefully, the AI systems' training data will catch up so that this eventually goes away. (It was about once a year before the recent flux.)
Our new preprint is online!
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20418
This paper was the undergraduate project of Leila Thompsky (who will be a PhD student in applied mathematics at Princeton starting in the fall) and Yolanda Wu (who is currently in a Master's program in quantitative finance at Carnegie Mellon University). The mentoring was led by my former PhD student Jerry Luo.
One the subject of yesterday's XKCD…
Here is the final published version of our paper in the special issue for Leonid Bunimovich's 75th birthday: https://www.math.ucla.edu/~mason/papers/pafav11n1p169-published.pdf
"Ginzburg–Landau Functionals in the Large-Graph Limit" (by Edith J. Zhang, James Scott, Qiang Du, and MAP)
"LLM hallucinations in the wild: Large-scale evidence from non-existent citations": https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07723
My first set of D & D dice, which I bought about 35 years ago from Games of Westwood.
Here is the published version of our paper "Bounded-confidence opinion models with random-time interactions" (by Weiqi Chu and me): https://www.math.ucla.edu/~mason/papers/weiqi-PRE2026.pdf
