Michael Kinyon

@profkinyon

Mathematics professor at the University of Denver. Quasigroups, Semigroups, Automated Deduction. He/Him. Occasionally drop in at Mathstodon, but not as much as I used to.

809 Folgt1.652 Follower1.457 Posts

YouTube Bluesky

Ist das dein Profil?Übernimm es — dann gehört dir profkinyon.dirty.social.Profil übernehmen

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· 8d

I hate it when my fellow academics talk like this to bright, eager students and actually mean it

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Jul 10

I'm so sad (dicing onions)

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Jul 9

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Jun 19

I seem to be in the weights. Mistral 3.2 hallucinated that I am a former Republican mayor of Provo, Utah.

MICHAEL KINYON
MATHEMATICIAN SPECIALIZING IN QUASIGROUPS
> 354 STRENGTH * TOP 15% <
GPT-5.5 SAYS
AMERICAN MATHEMATICIAN KNOWN FOR WORK IN NONASSOCIATIVE ALGEBRA, QUASIGROUPS, LOOPS AND RELATED ALGEBRAIC STRUCTURES

followed by a bar graph featuring how much I show up (I guess) in a list of various LLMs.

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Jun 3

I had no idea the "NP vs P" problem was settled three years ago. (shoutout to @lukasmathgraf.bsky.social for spotting this)

screenshot of a webpage for a Springer-published book called "Pedigree Polytopes" by Tirukkattuppalli Subramanyam Arthanari. It alleges to have settled the "P vs NP" problem.

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· May 17

Chilling on the back porch. Literally, because the weather is rapidly cooling off

A stunningly handsome 62 year old man with silver hair and matching Columbia jacket. He has large round glasses. The background is a baby blue exterior wall.

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· May 14

Out of idle curiosity, I asked Google's Gemini to try to humanize a proof generated by an automated theorem prover. In short, it didn't do very well. But, uh, this bit was interesting...

A Note on the Algebraic Structure

Since you are Michael Kinyon, you'll recognize this specific identity is essentially probing the autotopism group of the loop...

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· May 11

My friend and coauthor Des MacHale sent me a copy of his book (coauthored with Yvonne Cohen) _New Light on George Boole_ (2018). I am looking forward to reading it.

A stunningly handsome 62 year old man with blue eyes, silver hair, large round glasses and a green shirt, holding a mostly blue book entitled "New Light on George Boole". In the background are some messy bookshelves.

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Apr 26

Film you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, DC, Marvel, Disney, Pixar, Spielberg, Cameron, Wachowskis, or Ghibli.

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Apr 15

Check out the Schediphone. No idea what it would sound like.

Picture of a Schediphone, a rare brass instrument with two bells.

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Apr 14

The elephant bird from Horton Hatches an Egg

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Apr 8

Helping my beleaguered undergrads get used to mathematical obnoxiousness

Snippet reading:
From this, it is ``easy to see'' (can you?)

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Apr 5

Me, preparing for full cognitive surrender

Head shot of a grinning, incredibly good looking 62 year old man with short, silver hair and slightly tinted, round, wire-rimmed glasses.

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Mar 27

Here is another version I found on reddit. It is probably made by the same elevator company. This one is a little clearer.

Elevator sign. Upper left shows icons for a man and a woman and says "8 MAX" but the wording is on its side. There is a no smoking icon in the lower left. In the lower right is a fire icon and a crossed out person. In the upper right are icons for an adult and a child, and a crossed out icon for an unaccompanied child. The bottom of the sign indicates room numbers on the various floors.

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Mar 25

Strawberry Fields forever

$Blackboard bold F sub q (the field of order q) in WildStrawberry color. Generated by the following code: \documentclass[12pt]{amsart} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage[dvipsnames]{xcolor} \begin{document} \Huge \[ \color{WildStrawberry}\mathbb{F}_q \] \end{document}$

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Mar 20

$\rightsquigarrow$

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Mar 18

Source: R. Asera, _Calculus and Community: A History of the Emerging Scholars Program_, A Report of the National Task Force on Minority High Achievement, The College Board, May 2001, p. 12.

I recognized that mathematics is hard. I understood that math is highly condensed thought. But I liked math; I had personally spent hundreds of hours learning mathematics on my own, and I understood something about intensifying the experience, and about motivation. If students didn't have experience coming in, we could intensify their experience, but they needed a lot of time. People who did math on their own outside of class could outperform those who only did what was assigned in class. -- Uri Treisman, Professor of Mathematics and Director, Charles A. Dana Center, the University of Texas at Austin

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Mar 6

You're trapped in the last TV show you watched. Where are you?

A scene from Natsume's Book of Friends where he, with his back to us, is hanging out at a sake party with a bunch of yōkai.

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Mar 3

Witness the Blood Moon's rise. When its red glow shines upon the land... the aimless spirits of slain monsters return to flesh

A photo of the March 3 2026 lunar eclipse, aka, a blood moon

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Mar 1

$Very early in our mathematical education - in fact in junior high school or in high school itself - we are introduced to polynomials. For a seemingly endless amount of time we are drilled, to the point of utter boredom, in factoring them, multiplying them, dividing them, simplifying them. Facility in factoring a quadratic becomes confused with genuine mathematical talent. -- I. Herstein, \emph{Topics in Algebra}, 2nd ed. (1975), p. 153$

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Feb 20

Inspired by this, I asked for a very long sentence without the letter L. As you can see, the AI successfully wrote a gender neutral sentence satisfying the constraints, and... uh... oh.

Gemini's response:

Here is a very long sentence that does not use the letter L:
"If a person wants to win at this game, he must be sure to avoid every word with that common mark, even when it might seem tough or very hard to do so; for instance, he can try to speak of a bright sun, a red dog, or a deep pit, but he cannot ever mention a light, a yellow bird, or a small hill, as doing so would cause him to lose his status as a master of this craft."
Key Constraints Observed:
No "L": Words like "light," "look," "little," or "long" (the word itself contains an L) were carefully excluded.

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Feb 14

I usually don't have any obstruction to lifting a map, it's folding it back up that's challenging.

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Feb 7

Poof by (electrostatic) induction

Blue-eyed cat whose hair is standing up in all directions because of static electricity

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Feb 3

Nah

Front cover of the original 2016 edition of the book "Are Numbers Real?" by Brian Clegg, subtitled "The Uncanny Relationship of Mathematics and the Physical World". There is also a review blurb at the bottom of the cover; I will spare you and myself from that.

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Jan 29

The associate dean just sent around a message asking if anyone still uses clickers in classrooms. My brain immediately went to one particular kind of clicker, briefly wondering how anyone would use one in a mathematics class.

An image of a clicker from _The Last of Us_ games. A clicker is a particular type of infected enemy in the game. They find their way by echolocation, hence their name.

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Jan 28

Elmo from Sesame Street saying "Rocco's just a rock!"

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Jan 27

I'll let someone else write verses for analysis, topology, etc.

A Math Major's Lament

Groups and rings and finite fields
The dizzy dancing way I feel
When I consider prime ideals
Algebra seems like play

But now the term is almost done
I'll go outside and see the sun
And forget all the math I've done
It will all drift away

I've looked at math from both sides now
Compute and prove
But still somehow
There is no theorem I recall
I really don't know math at all

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Jan 26

Neugebauer on the purpose of historical studies

$I do not consider it as the goal of historical writing to condense the complexity of historical processes into some kind of ``digest" or ``synthesis". On the contrary, I see the main purpose of historical studies in the unfolding of the stupendous wealth of phenomena which are connected with any phase of human history and thus to counteract the natural tendency toward oversimplification and philosophical constructions which are the faithful companions of ignorance. -- Otto Neugebauer, \emph{The Exact Sciences in Antiquity}, 2nd ed., Appendix II, {\S}84$

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Jan 5

A parody of Michaelangelo's "Creation of Adam" where Adam is holding a coffee pot and pouring coffee into a cup held by God.

Michael Kinyon@profkinyon· Dec 25

I really wanted a French monic baguette, but they were all out