Ben Brubaker

In the summer of 2024, I reported on an online community that nailed down the precise value of a number called BB(5) — the first big breakthrough in 50 years on an old problem in theoretical computer science known as the busy beaver game.

I have raised this blog from the dead to tell of the untapped aesthetic potential of seven-segment displays — the digital displays used in calculators, microwaves, and elevators.

The paper reporting the main result of my postdoctoral research was finally published on Tuesday, nearly a year after my departure from Boulder.

Say the answer you get is 3 when you’re supposed to get 4.

Today Quanta published an explainer I wrote on the subject of resonance.

I’ve somehow become the go-to twitter critic (jointly with Douglas Natelson, a Rice University physics professor with an excellent blog) of a recent unpublished manuscript that has generated a lot of premature press coverage.

I’m back from a long blogging hiatus during which I finished up my postdoc and moved across the country, and I’m hoping to post more frequently going forward.

Last month the experiment I worked on as a graduate student published its latest results in Nature.

In my favorite New Yorker cartoon, by Bob Mankoff, a businessman sits at his desk in a well-appointed office with high-rise views and a framed portrait of a distinguished predecessor.

During my first semester of grad school I worked as a teaching assistant for a freshman physics lab, where I occasionally encountered statements like “the mass of the ball was ten.”