Acting University President Claire Shipman, CC ’86, SIPA ’94, described Columbia’s Wednesday agreement with President Donald Trump’s administration to pay $220 million to restore funding as “in line with our values” in her first interview with Spectator. l8r.it/agLK

An important update regarding campus access from President Jennifer L. Mnookin: president.columbia.edu/news/…

New: Mamdani’s admin is officially coming out in favor of restoring public access to Columbia University’s main campus, reversing his predecessor’s support for keeping it closed due to safety concerns over pro-Palestinian protests. w/ @madinatoure politico.com/news/2026/09/04…

We're stuck - the risk of violence is too great with a mayor who said he would refuse police even when needed to protect students and campus functioning.

from my own convos with admin in the past year, every single dean wants the gates open — yet once again the will of the majority is overruled by the shadow rule of the trustees

Some math regarding the pied-a-terre tax. If I own a $5 million condo, the tax is 6.5% - every year, forever. That's $325,000. Prospective buyers understand this, and they 're not stupid. They price it in. They calculate, or "capitalize," the obligations, determining the present value of all that debt. The numbers are devastating. Using a discount rate (or "cap rate") of 6% means you knock $5.4 million off the value of the property... ...meaning you wouldn't even take the property if it was given to you for free... ...meaning the value of the condo has been reduced to less than zero from $5 million. You've been Zohran'd. So, a fair question to ask is, "If my $5 million condo is now worth zero, am I now exempt from the tax? And does my exemption drive the value back to $5 million, so now I'm getting taxed again?" Does anyone understand how insane this is?

I solved 6 open Erdős problems in 5 days, using @OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol. I have a math background, but the Codex workflow I used does not require deep mathematical knowledge. Here’s exactly how I approached it, including my prompts 🧵

🚨New Paper with @Weiye_Xi , @ciamac and @Qiaoqiao2001 Here’s two different prediction markets priced at ~6.5%: 1. Will the US confirm the existence of Aliens in 2026? 2. *that* Spurs @ Knicks Game 4, ~4th quarter. They suggest that both these events are the same probability, but intuitively these feel very different: the latter (Knicks won!) feels a lot more uncertain. But prediction markets don’t immediately give us a way to quantify it.

We've lost an absolute giant today. RIP Dimitri Bertsekas. His probability and optimization books got me through my masters. Massive loss for the MIT community and the field.

Having cut a horrible deal with Trump giving him oversight of the university, @Columbia may be the worst campus in the United States for free speech, especially about Israel. It is threatening to discipline a student for distributing this legitimate flyer. trib.al/quwTJcC

What do the smartest kids in the world do when they grow up? I did the largest study of ~18,000 International Olympiad medalists (IMO, IOI and IPhO) over the last 25yrs, arguably the sharpest analytical minds of the world in high school, to see where they ended up and traced ~50% of them. Founders of ~20 unicorns and ~7 decacorns and ~10 billionaires: OpenAI, Cursor, Stripe, Databricks, Perplexity, Ethereum, Cognition, Hyperliquid, Fireworks, Modal, Quora, Parallel, Cartesia, Wispr Most kids went to MIT, a whopping 12% of them, followed by Cambridge (7%) and Sharif (3%)! The career paths they chose (of those who graduated) were: — 36% Academia (professors) — 26% Other — 22% in Software / Tech — 12% in Quant / Finance — 5% Founders! The biggest employer was Google, by far, at 6%. Others interesting tidbits were: — 47 of them work at Jane Street (#3) — 38 at OpenAI (#5) — 15 at Anthropic — 8 at Cognition — 6 at Isomorphic Labs Olympiaders were 1500x more likely to be billionaires and 4000x more likely to be unicorn founders than the average person!