Timothy Gowers, Discover and Read the Best of Twitter Threads by @wtgowers

Timothy Gowers

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A while ago, I tweeted that I hoped Cambridge would allow us to post our online lectures publicly. I'm delighted to say that they do indeed allow this, so I

This poll seems to have amused some people and annoyed others: my guess is that the former mainly voted "No" or "It's complicated" and the latter mainly voted "Yes". Interestingly,

A bizarre discussion is going on on Twitter at the moment, concerning whether 2+2=5. Apparently, it's "woke" to try to undermine the truth we all know, that 2+2=4. As a

A few months ago I made a slightly mad decision to buy a field. Here's a picture of the sort of vegetation it contained in December. I did it because

In English this time. This announcement on the Collège de France's website gives me an excuse to add a couple of things that are well known in France, but less

It is often suggested that one should teach Euclidean geometry in order to introduce children to the notion of proof. Today my children learnt a huge amount about proof in

I want to say a little bit more about @joel_c_miller's point below, and explain why, like several more knowledgeable people I follow (such as @nataliexdean), I am sceptical about the

@realDonaldTrump didn't actually propose injecting people's lungs with disinfectant. The idea of using disinfectant was clearly meant as an analogy -- hence the words "something like". Important to be fair,

A lot of people have been thinking about ways in which it might be good if the world *doesn't* go back to normal after the pandemic. Quite a few on

A naive question that's been bugging me. Suppose you make a mask out of e.g. a scarf, and it is not 100% effective -- i.e., it is possible for the

As a little exercise (not to be taken seriously, but I might as well share the results) I took the UK's daily death figures from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/ and for each day

It's good to do a cost-benefit analysis, but this is not the right comparison. It needs to be between the number of avoidable deaths caused by the lockdown and the