Storyline The mathematician who proved why hipsters all look alike What brain neurons tell us about the 'hipster effect' when all contrarians end up looking the same.

MIT Technology Review wrote about a study that found hipsters look alike. A man mistakenly thought the photo at the top of the story was of himself and threatened legal action.

(Ed.: In the spirit of holiday re-gifting, here's a piece from the archives on the math behind why hipsters all look alike. It originally appeared in November 2014.) Jonathan Touboul is a ...

You can spot a nonconformist a mile away. Because they all look alike. Just ask mathematician Jonathan Touboul, an associate professor at Brandeis University. Like the rest of us, Touboul has ...

It’s shear madness! Brooklyn’s hipster beard craze has grown so popular that men in New York are rushing to doctors for “facial hair transplants” — surgery that helps make beards look ...

Why do all hipsters look the same? This is a question anyone scrolling through Instagram has probably asked themselves, at least three times a day. Now, it appears, math has an answer to the ...

Do all hipsters look the same? A new article in the MIT Technology Review suggests yes, and a man's angry response to his purported photo with the story all but proves it. The "hipster effect," as ...

Gideon Lichfield of the MIT Technology Review talks about how a man blasted the publication for using a photo of him in a story about how all hipsters look the same, but it was someone else.

Now let’s consider a world with just hipsters and a larger population — Touboul examined a simulation with 5,000 of them. When each is randomly assigned to be either punk or normcore, the ...

Hipsters all look and act alike because, being generally slow-moving mammals, it is impossible for them to stay on top of the mainstream trends they're trying to resist.

Why do hipsters all look alike? This question has troubled great thinkers, as well as some less-great thinkers, the world over. Jonathan Touboul, a mathematical neuroscienctist at the Collège de ...

It's a running joke that male hipsters all look alike with their flannel shirts, thick beards and other seemingly off-brand attributes. But a comical incident in the MIT Technology Review might ...