The guest
Luís and João Batalha: Brothers and co-founders of Fermat's Library, a platform for annotating academic papers and a popular Twitter account that shares visual math factoids. One studied computer science, the other physics.
What this episode covers
Lex Fridman talks with brothers Luís and João Batalha, founders of Fermat's Library, about how scientific papers are read, shared, and understood. They argue that academic publishing is broken, that paywalled journals add little value while extracting public money, and that science should be free and open. The conversation ranges across the backstories behind famous papers, the gamification of citation metrics, crowdsourced peer review, and how tools like their annotation platform, the Librarian extension, and even Twitter threads can make dense science accessible. They close with stories about Perelman, Terence Tao, sports analytics, and the Messi-versus-Ronaldo debate.
Recommended on this episode
MediaRecommended
Machine Learning Street Talk
Machine Learning Street Talk
“that i recommend highly”
“machine learning street talk i think that's the name of the show the that i recommend highly that's the right thing but uh they they do exactly that”— Lex Fridman
The guest's own work
ProductBy the guest
Fermat's Library
Luís and João Batalha
“co-founders of fermat's library which is an incredible platform for annotating papers”— Lex Fridman
ProductBy the guest
Fermat's Library Twitter account
Luís and João Batalha
“for mars library is also a really good twitter account to follow i highly recommend it they post little visual factoids”— Lex Fridman
ProductBy the guest
Librarian (browser extension)
Fermat's Library
“librarian is a browser extension that we developed that is sort of an overlay on top of archive”— guest
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
BookReferencedISBN verified
Birth of a Theorem
Cedric Villani
“i also read a book by cedric villani uh these cedric velani is this mathematician the fields medalist and in his book he tries to explain how he got from like a phd student to the fields metal”— guest
ProductReferenced
Microsoft Word
Microsoft
“they don't know what so i'm using uh microsoft word and uh mendeley and like all of those kinds of things”— Lex Fridman
ProductReferenced
Mendeley
Elsevier
“they don't know what so i'm using uh microsoft word and uh mendeley and like all of those kinds of things”— Lex Fridman
BookReferencedISBN verified
Gaming the Metrics
Mario Biagioli
“there's a a really interesting book on this topic called gaming the metrics it's a book by a researcher called mario biagioli”— guest
ProductReferenced
Spotify
Spotify
“you open spotify and you might not even pay for it you might be on the free version and you can listen to any song that has ever made”— guest
MediaReferenced
Game of Thrones
HBO
“you wrote a paper on a on game of thrones battle of winterfell just as a side little”— Lex Fridman
MediaReferenced
Ex Machina
Alex Garland
“i now know um alex garland the director of ex machina and i love it”— Lex Fridman
MediaReferenced
Arrival
Denis Villeneuve
“stephen wolfram and his son were were collaborating with the movie arrival in designing the alien language”— Lex Fridman
MediaReferenced
The Martian
Andy Weir
“the martian was also big on that like the book in the movie was all about like can we actually is this plausible”— guest
BookReferencedISBN verified
Artemis
Andy Weir
“there's a book about a colony on the colony on the moon and he goes about like all the details that would you know be required about setting up a colony in the moon”— guest
MediaReferenced
Interstellar
Christopher Nolan
“i think interstellar was one where they also consulted heavily with with the number of yeah i think even resulted in a couple of papers”— Lex Fridman
MediaReferenced
Moneyball
Bennett Miller
“have you ever watched moneyball like yeah so they're trying to do something similar to taking that in this case basketball taking a statistical approach”— guest
Big reveals from this episode
- Luís reveals that as students they would download and email paywalled papers to each other because one brother in Europe couldn't access them.
- The Bitcoin paper was the very first paper they put on Fermat's Library, and it took weeks to fully understand.
- They confirm seminal papers like the DNA double helix and Higgs boson papers are annotated on the platform.
- They reveal Fermat's Library is run as a deliberate side project with a 20-year vision, not a fast-growth startup.
- João recreated Fermi's atomic-blast energy calculation using a viral video of a Beirut bride whose dress was displaced by the explosion.
- Lex admits he wrote a soccer player and ball tracking system but never released it for fear it would consume his life.
- The brothers published a real differential-equations analysis of Game of Thrones' Battle of Winterfell.
Worth remembering
- About 50% of all arXiv papers tagged 'machine learning' were published in just the last 12 months.
- A 1960s NIH biology-preprint experiment was killed within six years due to pressure from journals.
- A single Wikipedia user has edited roughly one third of all articles.
- Eugene Garfield's citation-mapping work inspired Larry Page and Sergey Brin's PageRank algorithm.
- Donald Knuth's TeX and LaTeX should arguably have earned him a Nobel Peace Prize for democratizing scientific writing.
- Freeman Dyson introduced the entire Dyson sphere concept, including how to detect alien life via infrared, in a single one-page paper.
- Fermi calculated the Trinity bomb's energy by throwing torn paper into the blast, within about 20-25% of the true value.
- Re-analyzing 600,000 free throws from Kaggle showed players aren't 'hot' but simply better on the second attempt.
- Perelman rejected the Fields Medal partly because others claimed undue credit for his Poincaré conjecture proof.
- In mathematics a paper can take close to three years between upload and journal publication.
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