Nuclear weapons, Google, and AI share the same secret. They all run on math from a 100 year-old Russian feud. Two professors hated each other so much their battle created equation that now controls the digital world. How academic rivalry accidentally built the modern world:🧵
The secret is called a "Markov chain" and it's everywhere. Every Google search, ChatGPT response and nuclear reactor uses this SAME mathematical principle. It predicts the future by only looking at right now. And it exists because two Russian mathematicians hated each other.
Meet the enemies: Pavel Nekrasov - Deeply religious, powerful, believed math could prove free will and God's existence. Andrei Markov - Atheist socialist, zero patience for mixing religion with mathematics. 1905 Russia was tearing apart, and even mathematicians picked sides.
Nekrasov's argument was clever: Marriage stats, crime rates, birth rates all follow patterns. Since these come from human decisions, and patterns are stable, this PROVES free will exists. To him, free will wasn't philosophical - it was scientifically measurable.
Markov thought this was complete nonsense. So he set out to destroy Nekrasov's argument by proving you could get stable patterns WITHOUT independence. His weapon: the 20,000 letters of "Eugene Onegin" by Alexander Pushkin. He was about to accidentally change human history.
Markov stripped all punctuation and spaces, creating massive string of letters. 43% vowels, 57% consonants Then he noticed something: Whether the next letter was a vowel or consonant DEPENDED heavily on the current letter. The letters weren't independent - they formed chains.
He built a prediction machine: Start with any letter, use current letter to predict next with set probabilities. Vowels had 13% chance of another vowel, 87% chance of consonant. The machine produced text with the EXACT same vowel-consonant ratio as the original poem.
Markov shattered Nekrasov's argument. Dependent events could still produce stable patterns. Social stats didn't prove free will - just showed math relationships. He ended his 1906 paper with a final insult: "Free will is not necessary to do probability." Then he moved on.
For 40 years, Markov chains sat unused in dusty math journals. Until 1946, when everything changed. Mathematician Stanislaw Ulam was recovering from brain inflammation, stuck in bed, playing endless games of Solitaire. He had a question that would reshape warfare forever.
"What are the odds a randomly shuffled Solitaire game can be won?" Impossible to calculate - 8 Ă— 10^67 arrangements. But Ulam realized: What if we simulate 1000s of random games & just count the wins? His colleague John von Neumann spotted the problem, neutrons aren't cards.
Nuclear reactions aren't independent events. Each neutron's behavior depends on its current state - position, energy, history. Von Neumann realized they needed Markov's forgotten math to model neutron behavior. They built the first Monte Carlo simulation using Markov chains.
1945 Trinity test succeeded, but scientists still struggled to predict nuclear behavior precisely. Ulam's Solitaire insight led to Monte Carlo simulations using Markov chains. From that point forward, every nuclear design relied on Russian spite math to model neutron behavior.
Fast forward to 1996. Two Stanford PhD students faced a different problem. The internet was exploding, but search engines were terrible - just keyword matching. Pages gamed rankings by stuffing invisible keywords. They needed to measure webpage "quality" not just relevance.
Their breakthrough: Treat the web as a giant Markov chain. Each webpage is a "state" Links between pages are "transitions" Imagine a random surfer clicking links forever - which pages would they visit most often? Those pages must be most important. They called it PageRank.
Google launched in 1998 using Markov chains to rank every webpage. Today, Alphabet is worth $2 trillion. Every search you've ever done runs on the same math Markov created to spite his religious rival. But the story gets even wilder.
ChatGPT, Claude, every AI that predicts text? They're highly sophisticated versions of Markov's 1906 letter-prediction machine. Same principle: Look at current state, predict what comes next. Your phone, searches, nukes, AI - all running on century-old academic revenge.
And that’s a wrap! Well… talk about one of history’s wildest butterfly effects. Imagine telling Markov his academic diss track now powers nuclear research and every Google search you make. Scientists back then were built different. Drop your thoughts 👇
Are you a Founder, Coach or Consultant looking to grow your personal brand and drive traffic to your offers with no effort? 100% DFY My 4-step system has driven 15M+ views and multiple booked calls in the last 30 days Book a call if interested👇 https://calendly.com/mrajgor15...
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed reading this thread 1. Follow @meetMrajgor 2. RT the first tweet https://x.com/meetMrajgor/stat...
Credits: https://youtu.be/KZeIEiBrT_w?s...
@meetMrajgor This is a solid breakdown. Still trying to process all this information at a go. But if you ask me, I think I get the point Nekrasov was trying to make. To some extent, it makes perfect sense. Only that he made the mistake of thinking every decision could be mathematically
@thedancingink Appreciate you taking time to read it :) It’s a really fascinating topic! You should check out the original YT video which gave me inspiration for this thread… attached it in credits at the end of thread!
@meetMrajgor I used to be terrible at math and always wondered if it’s even useful in real life… but after reading this thread, I get it now that Crazy how one old math beef literally powers nukes, Google, and even AI today.
@TheCopyCue Wild Indeed! 🤯
@meetMrajgor I'm here before it goes viral hehe Banger thread bro
@TheMariusGu Much love brother! Let’s see haha
@meetMrajgor This is the crazy part about history what starts as ego or rivalry often creates breakthroughs that change the world.
@sandhya_tweets_ Indeed! Especially the butterfly effect from this one was wild!
@meetMrajgor Oh my! What a science fact
@meetMrajgor @threadreaderapp unroll
@meetMrajgor Your thread is gaining traction! #TopUnroll https://threadreaderapp.com/th... 🙏🏼@PalveMantra for 🥇unroll
@meetMrajgor @grok summarise and add context to this thread to make it add value for a fourteen year old.
@meetMrajgor @threadreaderapp unroll