Crémieux

The biggest news of the day should once again be about DOGE.

A new Executive Order was passed a few minutes ago.

It empowers DOGE to spearhead the complete reorganization of the federal government🧵 

The first part of this Order is simple:

The OMB will put out a plan to make the federal workforce smaller and more efficient, including a stipulation that agencies must remove four existing employees for each new hire, with some exceptions. 

The second part is meatier.

New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.

But that's not even the big part yet. 

Third, agency heads will prepare for a massive reduction in the federal workforce.

This workforce reduction will apply to employees not performing necessary and statutorily mandated functions, so if Congress isn't protecting your job, you're likely leaving. 

Fourth, suitability judgments about the excepted service will be expanded.

People who do not meet certain legal obligations, people who do not certify NDA compliance, and people who steal or misuse government resources are deemed no longer suitable for employment in it. 

Here's the really big part of this order. It's kind of buried down deep, but it's very important:

Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections, and offices to consolidate. 

Putting this all together, what the Order entails is a massive reorganization of the federal workforce and the streamlining of the civil service to make its operation line up with the goals of DOGE.

Not only that, but it empowers DOGE by embedding Team Leads for oversight.

Couple this with the February 4 OPM memo on CIOs, and what we have is staggering:

The federal government will be centralized, stripped down, and more intimately controlled by the President and his delegates, with control enhanced via DOGE.

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1886953423368573017

This is the biggest news of the day, and it's hard to overstate just how big it is.

Because the federal government has grown so unwieldy that no one can provide you with a semblance of an outline of it, measures like this may just be needed to tame the beast.

Get ready!

You can read the EO here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/implementing-the-presidents-department-of-government-efficiency-workforce-optimization-initiative/

Mathematicians in Renaissance Europe partook in academic duels to win one another's respect, students, assets, and academic positions.

A duel like this is how the cubic equation became known—the first real algebraic discovery since the Babylonians.

Let's talk angry Italians🧵 

The cubic equation was sought after by numerous ancient civilizations, from India to Greece, and despite attempts, a solution was never found

You're probably familiar with these equations, but they're of the form x^3 + cx = d

Without a squared term, we have a "depressed cubic" 

The mathematician Scipione del Ferro, a professor at the University of Bologna, found a way to solve these cubic equations around 1510.

And then he kept the method a complete secret until his death bed. 

In Renaissance Italy, the life of a mathematician was one that was always beset by trouble precisely because mathematical duels existed.

At any moment, a talented upstart could come and issue you a series of mathematical problems to initiate a duel. 

If you failed to solve the problems, you could lose prestige, you could lose money, you could lose students, and you could even lose your teaching position.

For that reason, del Ferro kept his method a secret so he could quash any upstarts seeking to take his job.

At least until he was on his death bed almost 20 years later.

From his death bed, he taught his student Antonio Fior how to solve the depressed cubic.

Fior, who was a bit of a gambler and a loser, started bragging and sought to prove his mathematical mettle by using it in duels 

Fior issued a series of thirty different problems to a new mathematician in town, one Niccoló Tartaglia.

Tartaglia responded with his own thirty questions, and they both agreed to the duel and had the notary Iacomo Zambelli certify what would happen to the loser. 

The terms of this duel were not very extreme.

The loser would concede his inferiority and provide the other one a lavish dinner per unsolved question. 

Tartaglia solved Fior's questions in two hours

In the whole 40-50 day period of time he was allotted, Fior failed to solve a single one of Tartaglia's questions

Everyone in Venice thought this was exciting and embarrassing for Fior, and news even spread to Tartaglia's hometown 

Tartaglia was an overnight celebrity

Tartaglia had figured out an important formula some time before the duel, and Fior wasn't bright enough to even use it

From here on, Tartaglia's life was made! People came from far and wide to be his students, and everyone wanted his secret

One particularly persistent fellow who nipped at Tartaglia's heels was Giralomo Cardano.

Cardano sent Tartaglia letter after letter asking for his secret, but the famous mathematician would not budge. He wouldn't even provide him with a question from the duel. 

Until one day, after being bribed with an introduction, Tartaglia agreed that Cardano he could have his formula on the condition of never revealing it to a soul.

Now, bear with me.

Notation was, in those days, less standardized. Tartaglia's equation came in the form of a poem: 

But, some years later, Cardano acquired Scipione del Ferro's notes on the formula and thought "Well, it wouldn't violate my oath if I published this, since it wasn't from Tartaglia."

Both men arrived at the same formula, so what's the harm?

Enter Cardano's Ars Magna:

Tartaglia was furious about Cardano's book and sought to make Cardano pay him by taking him to court.

But the courts didn't care. After all, why should knowledge remain private? They didn't see a good reason why.

After failing to sue him in court, Tartaglia challenged Cardano to a mathematical duel

But Cardano could refuse Tartaglia, since he wasn't a mathematician, he was a medical doctor and public polymath

He had no academic position to defend, so he supported sharing all knowledge

Tartaglia was, of course, still upset.

But Cardano's student (whom Cardano had elevated into a teaching post he didn't personally want) saw this as a great opportunity to grow his own fame.

So, on his master's part, Lodovico Ferrari accepted the duel. 

The men met in a square in Milan and publicly debated equations.

But Ferrari was his better.

In fact, Ferrari was equal to the genius Cardano, and he had solved quartic equations—the last step before reaching the indeterminacy of quintic equations. 

Embarrassed by losing after desperately begging for a duel to prove his honor, Tartaglia fled Milan and his reputation was ruined. He lost his job and he went bankrupt.

Meanwhile, Ferrari was feted for the rest of his days and the job offers and requests for teaching flooded in.

At the end of the day, the European system of dueling with words, formulas, and findings to acquire academic positions, titles, and merits had its up- and downsides.

For one, the secrecy it engendered was probably harmful. People hid results to best would-be opponents.

In a very real sense, this system of dueling made it so science advances one death at a time, because people only gave up their secrets on their death beds!

But in another, it did encourage excellence, and it did provide room to celebrate non-academic geniuses like Cardano.

Do I wish we had a system for academic duels today?

Yes: absolutely, unequivocally, and completely.

I actually think it should go further. I think that if you prove someone's a fraud, you should be able to take their doctorate from them.

Oh to dream.

The source for this information is Fabio Toscano's The Secret Formula, a book that's well worth reading.

It's dry, but the subject is so fascinating on a deeper level that I can still highly recommend it.