the lich
@thelichhh • 4,352 subscribers
data analyst
Videos
The most influential mathematician of his generation stands in a German lecture hall and explains a foundation he is rebuilding from scratch. Almost nobody watches it. This is Peter Scholze at Bielefeld University, November 2025, opening lecture of a new public series called Ars Mathematica. Scholze became a full professor at 24 and won the Fields Medal at 30. His work on perfectoid spaces reorganized entire areas of arithmetic geometry inside a decade. Condensed mathematics is his attempt to fix something deeper: the way analysis and algebra refuse to sit together properly. He is proposing new foundations for how mathematical objects carry topology. Watch how he pitches it to a general audience. No prerequisites assumed, no dilution, a working mathematician showing why abstraction opens rooms you could not otherwise enter. A researcher I know rewatched the middle section twice and said it was the first time condensed mathematics felt like an idea rather than a rumour. Free on YouTube from a university channel, subtitles on. Some people prove theorems. He is replacing the floor.
the lich346,908 views • 1 day ago
MIT filmed a calculus course in black and white decades ago and it still teaches better than most of what shipped this year. Almost nobody watches it. This is Calculus Revisited, Unit 1, Lecture 1, taught by Herb Gross. Analytic geometry from the ground up, chalk on a board, 1 camera locked in place. Gross built the course for adults returning to math after years away. No prerequisites assumed. Every idea earned in front of you instead of quoted from a textbook. The opening move is simple division written on the board. From there he shows why coordinates work at all, the thing most courses skip and every student silently fakes. Watch how slowly he goes. Each step spoken out loud, nothing left implicit, the pace of someone who expects you to actually follow. A backend engineer I know rewatched Unit 1 twice before touching linear algebra and said it fixed a gap he'd carried for 12 years. MIT put the whole course online free under Creative Commons. Production value aged badly. The teaching didn't.
the lich338,449 views • 5 days ago
A Bell Labs veteran gave a 45-minute lecture in 1995 on 1 question every ML engineer skips: why does mathematics work at all. Almost nobody watches it. The man is Richard Hamming. He wrote the error-correcting code that keeps every hard drive, modem, satellite link, and QR scan from collapsing into noise. His question sounds like nothing. Why do symbols on a board predict planets they were never built for. Why did complex numbers, invented as pure abstraction, turn out to run all of electrical engineering. Why does a matrix eigenvalue decide whether a bridge stands. He calls it "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics." Newton wrote 1 equation and it held for the Moon, the tides, and a falling apple at once. Nobody ordered the universe to obey algebra. Watch the middle. He argues we find math everywhere partly because our brains evolved to see it, then admits that answer leaves most of the mystery standing. No slides. 1 old man, 1 chalkboard, 45 minutes. You train models on linear algebra every day. He spent a career asking why it works.
the lich146,724 views • 9 days ago
A Fields Medalist walked into a UCLA hall and explained prime numbers to people with no mathematics background. Almost nobody watches it. Terence Tao won the Fields Medal, mathematics' highest honour, then a MacArthur Fellowship less than a month later. He was UCLA's first professor to take the Fields. The talk is structure and randomness in the primes. Numbers that look scattered at every scale, yet obey rules strict enough to build cryptography on. That tension is the same one running through every model trained in 2026. Randomness with structure underneath, and the whole question of where one stops and the other starts. Watch how he pitches it. General audience, no prerequisites, one of the strongest living mathematicians choosing clarity over display. A cryptography engineer I know rewatched the middle section twice and said the primes stopped looking arbitrary. Free on YouTube from UCLA, 17 years online. The hardest minds explain most simply. The pattern never changes.
the lich49,416 views • 4 days ago
8 DGX Sparks on a desk just ran a frontier model at 400K context. A friend who owns the inference budget at a Berlin AI startup, $52K a month in API bills, sent me this at 2 a.m. with one line: "we're buying the hardware." It starts as a disaster. A mountain of cables burying $32K of NVIDIA silicon, nothing talking to anything. 54 minutes later the whole stack answers as 1 machine. 1TB of unified memory. GLM-5.2 loaded across all 8 nodes. The part that made him rewatch twice sits around the 25-minute mark, where 1 networking fix turns 8 boxes into a cluster. Most people quit exactly there. He paused it 4 times. Screenshotted the interface setup. Forwarded it to his CTO without a caption. The cloud bill was never the moat. The cables were.
the lich56,893 views • 12 days ago
Richard Hamming stood in front of Navy graduate students in 1995 and explained why smart engineers build the wrong systems. The camera caught 45 minutes of it. Almost nobody watches it. Hamming ran computing at Bell Labs when Bell Labs was inventing the modern world. Error-correcting codes carry his name. Every hard drive, every satellite link, every AI training run leans on his math. This lecture isn't about code. It's about why teams optimize the part and lose the whole. Every startup drowning in AI agents that work in demos and die in production is making the mistake he names here. He was 80 years old. He'd watched 4 decades of brilliant people fail the same way and distilled it into 1 chalk talk for students who mostly forgot it. An engineering director I know stopped the video near the middle, screenshotted the board, and made it his team's wallpaper. The footage sits free on YouTube. Fewer views than a desk lamp review. The systems fail the same way every decade. The lecture doesn't change.
the lich10,641 views • 6 days ago
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