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Mason Porter

@masonporter@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.7.0-beta.1
  • Open on mastodon.social

Professor 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.

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14 Posts
Joined October 29, 2022
Website:
http://www.math.ucla.edu/~mason/
Games:
Board games
RPGs:
Dungeons & Dragons
Baseball:
Los Angeles Dodgers

Posts

Open post
masonporter
Mason Porter @masonporter@mastodon.social · May 21, 2026
Mason Porter
@masonporter@mastodon.social

Professor 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.

mastodon.social

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.

A Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics with Adaptive Interaction Probabilities
arXiv.org

A Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics with Adaptive Interaction Probabilities

Models of opinion dynamics aim to capture how individuals' opinions change when they interact with each other. One well-known model of opinion dynamics is the Deffuant--Weisbuch (DW) model, which is a

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masonporter
Mason Porter @masonporter@mastodon.social · May 14, 2026
Mason Porter
@masonporter@mastodon.social

Professor 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.

mastodon.social

One the subject of yesterday's XKCD…

https://xkcd.com/3245/

Results Age
xkcd

Results Age

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masonporter
Mason Porter @masonporter@mastodon.social · May 12, 2026
Mason Porter
@masonporter@mastodon.social

Professor 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.

mastodon.social

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. 🙂

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masonporter
Mason Porter @masonporter@mastodon.social · May 11, 2026
Mason Porter
@masonporter@mastodon.social

Professor 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.

mastodon.social

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)

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masonporter
Mason Porter @masonporter@mastodon.social · May 11, 2026
Mason Porter
@masonporter@mastodon.social

Professor 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.

mastodon.social

"LLM hallucinations in the wild: Large-scale evidence from non-existent citations": https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07723

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masonporter
Mason Porter @masonporter@mastodon.social · May 10, 2026
Mason Porter
@masonporter@mastodon.social

Professor 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.

mastodon.social
Replying to @tao@mathstodon.xyz
@tao@mathstodon.xyz I essentially agree with the cooking/chef analogy, but there is also an important consideration for that (which, if I understand correctly, also occurs in the setting of chefs). While certain people (say, like us and, we hope, like all of our students) will need and want to digest proofs, there is a much larger set of people who don't care. That includes many of the people who might employ our students. Wealthy people value fancy chefs. A much larger set of people don't care.
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masonporter
Mason Porter @masonporter@mastodon.social · May 03, 2026
Mason Porter
@masonporter@mastodon.social

Professor 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.

mastodon.social

ChatGPT had a triangle fail.

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masonporter
Mason Porter @masonporter@mastodon.social · Apr 30, 2026
Mason Porter
@masonporter@mastodon.social

Professor 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.

mastodon.social

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.)

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masonporter
Mason Porter @masonporter@mastodon.social · Apr 26, 2026
Mason Porter
@masonporter@mastodon.social

Professor 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.

mastodon.social

My first set of D & D dice, which I bought about 35 years ago from Games of Westwood.

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masonporter
Mason Porter @masonporter@mastodon.social · Apr 08, 2026
Mason Porter
@masonporter@mastodon.social

Professor 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.

mastodon.social

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.

https://www.su.se/english/news/articles/2026-04-08-internationally-leading-professor-recruited-to-nordita

Nordita
Nordita

Nordita

Nordita is an international research organisation in theoretical physics.

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masonporter
Mason Porter @masonporter@mastodon.social · Mar 12, 2026
Mason Porter
@masonporter@mastodon.social

Professor 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.

mastodon.social

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

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masonporter
Mason Porter @masonporter@mastodon.social · Feb 08, 2026
Mason Porter
@masonporter@mastodon.social

Professor 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.

mastodon.social
Replying to @masonporter@mastodon.social
@tao Also, with log tables, there is the question of what AI-based or AI-necessited things should be added to projects like the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (DLMF). This is an exact question that Charles Clark asked me last week. The DLMF is the 'modern' version (though getting older) of Abramowitz and Stegun, and one change is that the latter has things like tables of values of evaluated special functions but the former does not (deemed as old-fashioned).
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masonporter
Mason Porter @masonporter@mastodon.social · Feb 08, 2026
Mason Porter
@masonporter@mastodon.social

Professor 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.

mastodon.social
Replying to @tao@mathstodon.xyz
@tao Not just making exams in class, but also tightening up and more people (myself included) making them closed-book, even though I have never liked that and it's not how we do research. There's just no choice. There are too many shortcuts available outside of the exam that we have to tighten up the rules to encourage students to study and learn, even at the expense of creating more "unrealistic" settings.
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masonporter
Mason Porter @masonporter@mastodon.social · Oct 04, 2024
Mason Porter
@masonporter@mastodon.social

Professor 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.

mastodon.social
Replying to @ProfKinyon@mathstodon.xyz
@ProfKinyon@mathstodon.xyz Paradise awaits.
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