Charlotte Aten

I'm a mathematician. Currently a postdoc at the University of Colorado Boulder. I like combinatorics, universal algebra, and category theory. I also write software, and I know that spreading technical literacy is critical to building a better world.

Public Key

npub1zqh53j0eka8dfmt0u098a764whrzykxavp7kkmcrrr762fjlyjusykdfr6

NIP-05 Address

caten@mathstodon-xyz.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqspqt6ge8umwnk5a4h78jn7ld2ht33ztrwkqlttdup33ld9ye0jfwg84yqew

Author Public Key

npub1zqh53j0eka8dfmt0u098a764whrzykxavp7kkmcrrr762fjlyjusykdfr6

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Last Notes

2025-06-03 19:55:36

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@nprofile…hflf You mean you don't want your engagement frequency on the software to be correlated with your child's academic performance and sold to their auto insurance company in twenty years?

2025-05-29 20:55:29

I think these predatory journals are really onto something with this idea that they should tell us how much of their «Original Article(s)» are allowed to be plagiarized.
#academia #publishing #PredatoryJournal
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/114/593/091/461/195/676/original/69e2052697dfef44.png

2025-05-24 03:58:47

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@nprofile…j0he I tried Stumbleupon again in the early 2020s and it was 100% ads.

2025-05-16 16:21:10

Just signed into a university computer running #Windows for the first time. The last #Microsoft OS I ran was Windows 7 and I have limited experience with later ones. At this point #Debian / #LinuxMint (i.e. #Cinnamon) looks more like Windows XP than current Windows does, which was disorienting. On a fresh account I was immediately asked to set up sign-in using my face and shown ads for #WhatsApp. About what I expected.

2025-04-17 19:33:24

So I recently learned that I need to get away from #PyCharm since #JetBrains has decided to "go AI":
https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/features/ai/
When looking at my other options, I saw that #Spyder (https://www.spyder-ide.org/) looked interested, then scrolled down and saw that it was funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chan_Zuckerberg_Initiative), which sounds like something I should avoid.
I'm currently thinking Eric (https://eric-ide.python-projects.org/) might be the way to go. I don't need (or want) anything fancy. I just want a #FOSS #Python #IDE that works well and will keep working without trying to charge me money, sell my data, or accost me with #LLM code vomit.
Are there any better (or different) options? Is there anything good I can install from the package manager on #Debian ?
#EricIDE

2025-04-16 03:27:29

I saw today that my CoCalc (https://cocalc.com/) license was about to renew. I've been meaning to move to a more #SelfHosting or #P2P paradigm, so this was good timing for me to cancel. I left this message when doing so:
"I want to support Sage, and I like using CoCalc, but I don't want to put money towards a service that supports Microsoft, Amazon, or OpenAI in any way. I didn't care so much about this before, and I even log in to CoCalc with a GitHub account, but I'm tired of having my work scraped for profit by people who donate to fascists who are destroying my nation. I would consider returning if all ties to these corporations were cut and cloud computing services came from responsible companies, perhaps in the EU."
I'm pretty sure I already have backups of everything I want from GitHub, so I can be done with them too. I should have quit when Microsoft first arrived. My plan is to switch to Radicle (https://radicle.xyz/) rather than another centralized service. I'll be sure to post about how that goes.
#Sage #math #SageMath #FOSS #CoCalc #Amazon #AWS #Microsoft #GitHub #facism #USpol #CloudComputing #AI #OpenAI

2025-04-15 02:24:28

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@nprofile…fa4k I'm proud to see that my alma mater made the list.

2025-03-09 16:42:51

Why don't we write the logarithm like this? It feels like teaching students what logarithms are is way more painful than teaching roots, but this notation emphasizes that they are perfectly analogous.
I can provide my rough #TexLatex source for this if people are interested.
#math #teaching #notation
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/114/133/445/374/683/906/original/215ba98e8bef8688.png

2025-03-03 02:49:13

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@nprofile…x220 Thanks for sharing this! Unfortunately, neither copying the folder nor making a symlink is working for me on Mint at the moment. I don't have the usr/lib/ directories for Firefox and Librewolf that some people were mentioning, just the home folder ones, but I think I'm gonna give up on this one for today.

2025-03-02 20:22:29

I've switched to lurking here for a while due to the effects the current political situation in the US is having on me. I am making some big changes to how I do things, including how I livestream and host various products of my math research. I'll be posting about the steps I take as I take them.
I have switched from #Firefox to #Librewolf on my desktops. This was pretty easy since I have been storing my bookmarks as a plain text file on my desktop for a while now. Very portable. I just wish #VideoDownloadHelper worked on Librewolf.
I am looking into #XMPP now and trying to find a server to sign up for. Does anyone know any with open registration?
I have also recently gotten into #IRC again, and am excited to get more familiar with the #Pidgin client on desktop.
#math #privacy #security #federation #software

2025-01-19 19:05:42

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@nprofile…6dcs Thanks for explaining! I think I really am looking for something P2P, since I will happily take poorer performance in exchange for not depending on people with the money to host relays.

2025-01-19 18:10:11

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@nprofile…6dcs It looks like the nostr GitHub page explicitly says that it is not P2P, just federated the way ActivityPub is. Has this changed?

2025-01-19 05:24:23

Is anyone working on #P2P server software compatible with #ActivityPub? It seems natural to be able to donate network resources instead of cash, and would make services even more difficult to censor.
#Mastodon #Fediverse #BitTorrent #IPFS #WebTorrent

2024-12-29 05:39:07

I've been reading "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan recently. One of the things that has stood out to me is the early American lamentation that women's intellectual potential is wasted in their subjugation. If 19th century aristocrats could see that about women, why can't their modern heirs see it about the working class?
They are so desperate to build machines that posess human intellect so that they might have more pliable slaves, yet they would squander the massive, efficient computing power of a billion unique human spirits in order to avoid sharing a fraction of a percent of their hoarded wealth.
What's more, these people are perverting large parts of mathematics and computer science in pursuit of their agenda, poisoning a new generation against the serious study of human reasoning and its relation to logic.
A ruling class that casually dismisses its people as "intellectually disabled" in order insult and suppress them is asking to be removed from power.
#feminism #math #AI #class #history #MachineLearning #abelism #ComputerScience

2024-12-13 22:34:32

I updated my bio. I am still interested in machine learning, and I am continuing my own projects in this area, but this terminology has become synonymous with an ideology and culture to which I am diametrically opposed.
There is great value in tools like optical character recognition, speech recognition, and machine translation (when ethically applied). However, the current regime selling machine learning tools as products is completely disconnected from what I would view as a healthy and productive contribution to society.
I would still like to contribute to practical applications of mathematics in the world, and I hope that academia will continue to support my efforts to contribute in a way that supports everyone, not just a small cadre of plutocrats.
#MachineLearning #AI #math #ethics #research

2024-10-18 17:15:37

I've found a citation of my own work on Wikipedia for the first time!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commutative_magma
Naturally, I read this page before I wrote my rock-paper-scissors paper. It's neat to see that my own work is now the citation for something that was unsourced "original research" on Wikipedia.
#math #research #Wikipedia #algebra #games #RockPaperScissors #AbstractAlgebra #UniversalAlgebra #combinatorics #GameTheory

2024-08-29 23:34:33

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@npub13t0…vj4p No constants are allowed, just variables. See my other reply in this thread for a more formal explanation of what I mean by "equations".

2024-05-06 02:10:10

I decided that I'm going to start streaming math research live on Twitch! You can see a little ad for this on YouTube (https://youtu.be/mpodnpSSpho). My new Twitch channel is https://www.twitch.tv/charlotteaten/
I'm actually messing around with this right now, just getting familiar with things, if you want to pop in and say hi.
#streaming #LiveStreaming #math #research #Twitch #coding

2024-03-16 23:05:13

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@npub1rkt…sqek I really appreciate this notice. For whatever reason, I never considered that I might qualify for PSLF since I am currently at a private university. It's great that it applies to nonprofit private institutions, as well.