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Scottish solids, final(?) comments
In the spring of 2009 I did spend a fortnight dog-sitting in a huge house in the countryside, belonging to my parents-in-law, who both passed away the year before. That particular day it was raining and thundering heavily. To distract myself from the sombre and spooky atmosphere in the house I began to surf the…
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What is the knot associated to a prime?
Sometimes a MathOverflow question gets deleted before I can post a reply… Yesterday (New-Year) PD1&2 were visiting, so I merely bookmarked the What is the knot associated to a prime?-topic, promising myself to reply to it this morning, only to find out that the page no longer exists. From what I recall, the OP interpreted…
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The odd knights of the round table
Here’s a tiny problem illustrating our limited knowledge of finite fields : “Imagine an infinite queue of Knights ${ K_1,K_2,K_3,\ldots } $, waiting to be seated at the unit-circular table. The master of ceremony (that is, you) must give Knights $K_a $ and $K_b $ a place at an odd root of unity, say $\omega_a…
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Pollock your own noncommutative space
I really like Matilde Marcolli’s idea to use some of Jackson Pollock’s paintings as metaphors for noncommutative spaces. In her talk she used this painting and refered to it (as did I in my post) as : Jackson Pollock “Untitled N.3”. Before someone writes a post ‘The Pollock noncommutative space hoax’ (similar to my own…
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Views of noncommutative spaces
The general public expects pictures from geometers, even from non-commutative geometers. Hence, it is important for researchers in this topic to make an attempt to convey the mental picture they have of their favourite noncommutative space, … somehow. Two examples : This picture was created by Shahn Majid. It appears on his visions of noncommutative…
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On2 : Conway’s nim-arithmetics
Conway’s nim-arithmetic on ordinal numbers leads to many surprising identities, for example who would have thought that the third power of the first infinite ordinal equals 2…
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Mumford’s treasure map
In the series “Brave new geometries” we give an introduction to ‘strange’ but exciting new ideas. We start with Grothendieck’s scheme-revolution, go on with Soule’s geometry over the field with one element, Mazur’s arithmetic topology, Grothendieck’s anabelian geometry, Connes’ noncommutative geometry etc.
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Connes-Consani for undergraduates (3)
A quick recap of last time. We are trying to make sense of affine varieties over the elusive field with one element $\mathbb{F}_1 $, which by Grothendieck’s scheme-philosophy should determine a functor $\mathbf{nano}(N)~:~\mathbf{abelian} \rightarrow \mathbf{sets} \qquad A \mapsto N(A) $ from finite Abelian groups to sets, typically giving pretty small sets $N(A) $. Using the…
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Connes-Consani for undergraduates (2)
Last time we have seen how an affine $\mathbb{C} $-algebra R gives us a maxi-functor (because the associated sets are typically huge) $\mathbf{maxi}(R)~:~\mathbf{abelian} \rightarrow \mathbf{sets} \qquad A \mapsto Hom_{\mathbb{C}-alg}(R, \mathbb{C} A) $ Substantially smaller sets are produced from finitely generated $\mathbb{Z} $-algebras S (therefore called mini-functors) $\mathbf{mini}(S)~:~\mathbf{abelian} \rightarrow \mathbf{sets} \qquad A \mapsto Hom_{\mathbb{Z}-alg}(S, \mathbb{Z} A)…