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Wiki on iTouch

I’ve reduced the springboard of my jailbroken iTouch to a minimalistic Dock consisting only of the iPhone Mail.app to read and write mails properly (as opposed to having to use webmail on an unbroken iTouch), an RSS-reader to watch other math-blogs and the arXiv (via Install.app under Productivity/MobileRSS), the Safari webbrowser and a Finder (via Install.app under Productivity/MobileFinder) to launch all other programs, when needed.

To achieve this effect, install (as in the jailbreak-post) all these apps as well as Customize.app (under Utilities). This allows you to change the icon order on your springboard and dock as well as to toggle the visibility of these icons. Just make sure to have either Finder or Customize visible at all times or it will be difficult to get at the invisible apps (an alternative is to install something called Sunburst).

While the iTouch is great to read, it is harder to type a lot of text into it. Whence the idea of running a Wiki on it (now that we have PHP enabled Apache) and use another computer to create the wiki-pages. For example think of a small database of weblinks with descriptions. Rather than bookmark them one by one in Safari, make wiki-pages for them and use the Search function to get the desired link.

The first problem is that Wikis take a lot of space and you would like to have it installed under /Library/WebServer/Documents to view it with your inbuild Safari browser by typing something like http://localhost/wiki. To see the problem with this, ssh into your iTouch and issue a df command. You will get something like

# df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/disk0s1            307200    297188      6940  98% /
devfs                       15        15         0 100% /dev
/dev/disk0s2          15551928    517904  15034024   4% /private/var

That is, you’ve used up almost all disk space of the partition on which the /Library/WebServer/Documents folder resides. So, we first need to move it to the other partition under /private/var, so why not create a Documents-folder under the root-homefolder and link to it?

cd /Library/WebServer
mv Documents /private/var/root/
ln -s /private/var/root/Documents Documents

Check it with http://localhost/ and you should still see your default Apache-page (though it now comes from another location). The next step is to find a PHP-Wiki hat works on the iTouch and doesn’t require a Mysql-database. I’ve tried at least ten without success and then I turned to the Wiki Engines Page and found QWikiWiki which does seem to work. So download it, rename the folder to something you like such as ‘qwiki’ and upload via SFTP to the /var/root/Documents folder of your iTouch and chmod it recursively to 777. If you ever need to change some of the PHP-variables, copy the php.ini from you mac over to the /opt/iphone/bin folder of the iTouch.

Finally, use a browser on your other computer to access the install file of Qwiki on the iTouch. For example, if the IP of iTouch is 10.0.1.197 then type

http://10.0.1.197/qwiki/install.php

and follow the online instructions. A few moments later you can type in your first wiki-page!

Some things still need to be done like optimizing the CSS for iTouch while serving the normal CSS for usual computers, but that’ll have to wait…

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first things first : jailbreak

You may have surmised it from reading this post : Santa brought me an iPod Touch! (( or rather : Santa brought PD2 an iTouch and knowing his jealous nature ordered one for him as well… )) Ive used an iPodClassic to transfer huge files between home (MacBook) and office (iMac) as well as for backup purposes. I wanted to find out what new tricks this trio could play now that iPod can go online. Major disillusion : one cannot even enable DiskUse via iTunes at the moment. (( rumours are that Apple will enable DiskUse in firmware 1.1.3, coming up next februari… )) What’s wrong with Apple? They make this marvelous piece of technology and then do a Golem-act preventing anyone else from using their precious thing. I understand their business plan, but soon it will make more sense to buy Apple shares than to buy their computers…

Enters the 13-year old AriX writing iJailbreak to free the iTouch. So, before you put any music or video on your pod (( and frankly there’s not much else Apple allows you to put on it )), dare to void the guarantee and risk your new gadget being bricked (( but, if I can pull if off you certainly can.. )) by Jailbreaking it! There are plenty of good guides around, both for Windows and Mac, but most of them can be slightly improved. I’ve followed Let’s Jailbreak the iPod touch 1.1.2 with OS X but shortened his downgrade to 1.1.1 procedure which is the first (and hardest) step in the whole procedure. The moment PD2 will see I can use Maps and Weather she’ll want me to jailbreak her iTouch too, so mainly for myself I list here the procedure before I forget it.

Jailbreak 1.1.2 with Leopard on Intel, use at your own risk.

Get a decent browser such as Firefox or Flock (to prevent the download to selfexpand, so when given the choice to open it with iTunes or save it to Disk, save!) and download Firmware1.1.1 and place it somewhere (why not create a Folder called Jailbreak).

Connect your iTouch and fire up iTunes and select your iTouch in the left column. Hold down the option key and click in the summary pane the Check for Update button. This will open a Finder window allowing you to navigate to the downloaded file and open it. The iTouch will downgrade itself to 1.1.1. Just wait until it reappears in iTunes and disconnect it.

With Safari on the iTouch go to jailbreakme.com and scroll to the bottom and click on the InstallAppSnap button. Let it do its magic and afterwards there is a new Installer-icon on your ‘springboard’ (the opening iTouch page). Open it and refrain from installing all the goodies now, just scroll down to Tweaks (1.1.1) open and select “OktoPrep” and install it (button top right-hand corner).

Connect iTouch to mac, start iTunes and select your iTouch. Click on the update button and now iTunes will bring you back to Firmware 1.1.2. After finishing wait until your iPod reappears in the left column. (Do not panic if you fail to see the Installer-icon on springboard, it will reappear later on). Then, close iTunes (your iPod stays connected via USB to the Mac). Use any browser on your mac to download Jailbreak 1.1.2 and place it somewhere.

Find the Java-applet jailbreak.jar in the folder and double click it. Again, magical things are happening ending with the iTouch booting up several times and you performed the Jailbreak.

Let’s open up the iTouch to the world

So, what was the point of all this? We still have no DiskUse enabled nor can we speak to the iTouch directly. But all of this is going to change rapidly. Let’s make it available to our DeskTop.

With “install package xxx” I will mean : fire up Installer from your springboard, donate as quickly as you can to the guys making this available, then click on the “install” icon lower-left. This will open up lists of packages, scroll down to package xxx, click on it to read more about it, and then hit the “install” button top-right. That’s it. (If you ever want to unistall a package, do the same process now starting from the “uninstall” icon lower-right).

Install first BSD Subsystem (under System packages) and the AFPd (under Network). This will turn your iTouch into an AFP-server. By clicking on its icon in the Springboard you can turn the server on and off (remember to turn it off when not needed!) and turn on Broadcast if you want the iTouch to show up on your Desktop (in the Leopard-Finder under ‘Shared’). You can now connect to the iTouch by clicking on its icon in the Finder and hitting connect. The default user/password combination for a Jailbroken iTouch are
root/alpine. Change this as soon as you figure out how to do it. ‘Alpine’ must be the most popular password right now… The AFPd-page also contains the Wi-Fi IP Address of the iTouch and you will need it soon, so write it down.

For we are going to connect via ssh and sftp to and from iTouch/Mac. Install the OpenSSH package (under System) and the Term-vt100 package (also under System). From the Mac to iTouch you can connect via something like

ssh root@10.0.1.197

(change the number to the IP-Address of the iTouch) and login with the alpine password. You’re in! Conversely, open up the Term-vt100 icon in the springboard which give you a genuine *nix-Terminal. You can connect via ssh to your mac provided you know its IP and your login. That’s all.

Btw. you can also use your favourite file-transport program (mine is Transmit to connect to and from your iTouch via SFTP. Right, now that the iTouch is under control we might as well give it a voice of his/her own.

Install Apache (under System) and PHP (under Development) and follow the instructions from the iTouch Fans Forum (you will need to register, but if you’re not an iTouch-fan there’s little point in you reading this post anyway) and you will have turned your iTouch into a PHP-enabled webserver! On the left is a screenshot of the proof via the php-info testpage.

Finally, we can turn the world upside down completely. Before all of this we had no way to get control of the iTouch, now we can use the iTouch to take control of all our Macs serving VNC (Leopard comes with it, enable the password in System Preferences/Sharing/Screen Sharing/Computer Settings and you’re under iTouch control). To pull this off, just install the VNsea package (under Network). It really works well!

Oh, you’re only here to install the iPhone Apps…

Well, that’s easy enough. Just follow the instructions of the Install and use iPhone Apps in iPod touch from the excellent blog by Rupert Gee. The most difficult part is to get hold of the iPhone Apps if you don’t own an iPhone… Well, I’m happy to provide you with this secret information

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NeB on Leopard and iPhone

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch and point your Safari browser to this blog you can now view it in optimised format, thanks to the iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme. I’ve only changed the CSS slightly to have the same greeny look-and-feel of the current redoable theme.

Upgrading a WordPress-blog running under Tiger (Mac OS 10.4) to Leopard produces a few anxiety moments. All of the standard tools (Apache, PHP and MySQL) seem no longer to work as before. For those of you who do not want to waste too much time over it, I’ll walk through the process.

After upgrading to Leopard you want to check whether your blog is still alive, so you fire up Safari and will be greeted by the message that Safari cannot find your server. Sure enough you forgot to start the WebServer in SystemPreferences/Sharing/Web Sharing. Having fixed this you will see the default Apache-screen because Leopard put these default-files in your webserver-root directory (/Library/WebServer/Documents). In case you installed your blog under a user account you will get a message that you enter forbidden territory, see below for the solution to that problem. Having removed all those index.html files (making sure NOT to delete the index.php of your blog) a more serious problem presents itself : you see the text-version of index.php meaning that PHP isnt working. You check the /etc/httpd/httpd.conf file and it still contains all the changes you made to it to get PHP running under Tiger, so what is going on?

Googling for something like ‘enabling PHP under Leopard’ you’ll discover that the configuration file used by the webserver is in a different location. It now resides at /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf. You will have to remove the hash sign (#) at the beginning of line 114 so that it reads

LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Next, you have to create a php.ini file and change one line. The first thing is settled by the following Terminal-commands

cd /private/etc
sudo cp php.ini.default php.ini

and in the php.ini you have to modify line 305 so that it becomes (removing the latter part of the line)

error_reporting = E_ALL

Restarting the webserver enables PHP. If you need more details check out the article Enabling PHP and Apache in Leopard. However, you are not quite done yet. Your blog will now show the WordPress-page that something is wrong with your mysql-database. However, mysql seems to be running fine as you can check from the Terminal so PHP cannot find it.

To remedy this, you have to add the locations (after the = sign) in the follwing two lines of the php.ini file

mysql.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock
mysqli.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock

Restarting the webserver should resolve the problem. But then your blog can still choke on old PHP-code in one of the plugins you use. In my case I was using an ancient version of the PHP-Markdown plugin but after replacing it with the newest version NeB looked just like I left it with Tiger…

A final point : webpages stored in personal Sites-folders cannot be served by Apache2 and will produce a message that you have not enough privileges to view the page. To resolve this, type the following command from the Terminal

sudo cp /private/etc/httpd/users/*.conf /private/etc/Apache2/users

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the unbearable lightness … (2)

Two brand new math-related blogs on which you can test my survival prediction :

The EMS Committee on Women and Mathematics Weblog “has the purpose to work as a fact-finding unit exposing the problems and supporting the recognition of achievements of women in mathematics. It is directed to take such actions as it deems appropriate to encourage more women to study mathematics at school level, at university level, and at research level, and to support women mathematicians in the academic positions.”

Timothy Gowers now has a blog called Gowers’s webblog and will no doubt soon change his default about page

Gowers’s post What might an expository mathematical wiki be like? addresses the ongoing discussion (mainly at the n-category cafe and the secret blogging seminar ) of the (dis)advantages of a wiki over a blog to communicate mathematics.

I think a wiki is way better at this, but it is also more problematic to maintain (for example, memory-wise). But then, there is the obvious solution : join Wikipedia! Probably it is a much better time-investment to set-up/modify/update a math-related wikipedia page than to use the volatile blog-format when it comes to explaining mathematics…

I admit, Ive never done this myself but instead spend (too much) time trying to blog about math I like. By chance, I found this sci.math thread on my previous tertra-lattices post, showing the futility of it all. If only these guys would have left a comment then I might have explained it better.

Since then, Im in a sort of a bloggers’ block.

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the unbearable lightness of math-blogging

Back from vacation and wanting to know what I’ve missed. Not much, it seems. Hence this rant.
Sit back and relax, I appreciate all hard work done by the few math-bloggers around entertaining thousands of math-lurkers wordwide. Still, I cannot refrain from adding this version of Carly Simon‘s refrein :

“You’re so vain, you probably think this post is about you
You’re so vain, I’ll bet you think this post is about you
Don’t you? Don’t you?”

Let’s start on a positive note. Here is the math-blogpost that touched me most this vacation. But then I’m (old) European, Ive been to their place and even know where they’ve taken their picture, so I’m a big fan of Vivatsgasse 7.

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GAMAP and new Antwerp blog

In recent years, Ive used this blog to post the programs of our summer-schools on noncommutative algebra and noncommutative geometry. As Ive promised to maintain a webpage for all announcements of the Antwerp Ring Theory Seminar (ARTS) and feel more comfortable with a blog-environment (compared to the straight MYSQL-coding of the present Arts website ), Ive set up a new blog for this purpose : theARTS

Clearly it would be a shame not to use the full power of this blog-environment. Hence, if you are somewhat connected to the ARTS (a present or former member, a visitor, a student or, as far as Im concerned, a partner of one of those) and like to blog at theARTS, just tell me and you will have authoring-privileges.

If you are interested in the program of the 2007 summer-school “Geometric and Algebraic Methods with Applications in Physics” head over to the official website also available from theARTS header-bar. Ive been told that there is still some money left if you want to attend this summer-school as a Socrates (meaning EU) student. Leave a comment at theARTS and someone will contact you.

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mathML versus LaTeXRender

No math
today. If you’re interested in the latest on noncommutative geometry,
head over to the NCG-blog where Alain Connes has a post on
Time.
Still, Alain’s post is a good illustration of what Ill be rambling about
TeX and how to use it in a blog.

If you’re running a math-blog,
sooner or later you want to say something more than new-age speak like
‘points talking to each other’ and get to the essence of it. In short,
you want to talk math and it’s a regrettable fact that math doesnt go
well with ASCII. In everyday life we found a way around this : we all
use TeX to write papers and even email-wise (among mathematicians) we
write plain TeX-commands as this language is more common to us than
English. But, plain TeX and the blogosphere don’t mix well. If you’re
expecting only professional mathematicians to read what you write, you
might as well arXiv your thoughts. Im convinced the majority of people
coming here (for whatever reason) dont speak plain-TeX. Fortunately,
there is technology to display TeX-symbols on a blog. Personally, I was
an early adapter to
LaTeXRender and even today a
fair share of page-views relates to the few
posts I did on
how to get latexrender working on a mac. Some time ago I
switched to mathML and now I’m
regretting I ever did…

Mind you, I’m convinced that mathML is the
‘proper’ way to get TeX to the internet but there are at the moment some
serious drawbacks. For starters, it is highly user-unfriendly. You
simply cannot expect people to switch browsers (as well as installing
extra fonts) just because they come to your site (or you have to be a
pretty arrogant git). Speaking for myself, Im still having (against my
better judgment) Safari as my default browser, so when I come to a site
like the n-category cafe I just
skim the plain-text in between and if (and only if) the topic interests
me tremendously I’ll allow myself to switch to Flock or Firefox to read
the post in detail. I’m convinced most of you have a similar
surfing-attitude. MathML also has serious consequences on the
server-side. If you want to serve mathML you have to emit headers which
expect everything to follow to be purified XHTML. If I ever forget a
closing tag in a post, this is enough to break down NeverEndingBooks to
all Firefox-users. I’ve been writing HTML since the times when the best
browser around was something called NCSA Mosaic so Ive a
pretty lax attitude to end-tags (especially in IMG-tags) and Im just
getting too old to change these bad habbits now… It seems I’m not the
only one. Many developers of WordPress-plugins write bad XHTML-code, so
the last couple of weeks I’ve been spending more time fixing up code
than writing posts. If you want to run a mathML-wordpress site you might
find the following hints helpfull. If you get a ‘yellow screen of
death’ when viewing your site with Firefox, chances are that one of your
plugin-authors missed a closing tag in the HTML-rendering of his/her
plugin. As a rule of thumb : go for the IMG-tags first! I’m sorry to
say, but Latexrender-Steve
is among the XHTML-offenders. (On a marginal note, LaTeXrender also has
its drawbacks : to mathematicians this may seem incredible but what
Latexrender does to get one expression displayed is to TeX an entire
file, get the image from the ps-file turn it into a gif and display it,
so one gets a GIF-folder of enrmous proportions. Hence, use Latexrender
only if you have your own server and dont have to care about memory
constraints. Another disadvantedge was that the GIFs were displayed with
a vertical offset, but this has been solved recently (use the ‘offset
beta’ files in the distribution)). Wrt. to that offset-beta version, use
this latex.php file instead (I
changed the IMG-line). Some plugins may not serve the correct headers
to display mathML. So, if you want to allow readers to have a
printer-friendly version of your mathML-post, get the WP-print plugin BUT
change to this wp-print.php file in order to
send the proper headers. Sometimes there are just forgotten lines/tags
in the code, such as in the [future calendar plugin](http://anthologyoi.com/wordpress/plugins/future-posts-calendar-
plugin.html). So, please use this version
of the future.calendar.php file. And so on, and so on. The joys of
trying to maintain a mathML-based blog… So, no surprise I’m seriously
considering to ditch mathML and change to normal headers soon. One of
the things I like about LaTeXRender is that it can be extended, meaning
that you can get your own definitions and packages loaded whereas with
mathML you’re bound to write iTeX, which Ill never manage. But, again,
mathML will be the correct technology once all major browsers are mathML
capable and the font-problem is resolved. Does anyone know whether
Safari 3 (in Leopard, that is Mac OS 10.5 to the rest of you) will be
mathML-able?

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noncommutative bookmarks

At
last, some excitement about noncommutative geometry in the blogosphere.

From what I deduce from reading the first posts, Arup Pal set up a new blog
called Noncommutative
Geometry
and subsequently handed it over to Masoud Khalkhali who then
got Alain Connes to post on it who, in turn, is asking people to submit
posts, such as todays post by David Goss.

Somehow, most people refer to the Noncommutative Geometry blog as
“Alain Connes’ blog” (for example Doctor Gero, Not Even
Wrong
, the n-category cafe and
possibly many others).

David Corfield over at the n-category cafe stops
short of suggesting to rename (by analogy) NeverEndingBooks into
Kontsevich’s blog

A new blog Noncommutative Geometry
has begun, which appears to be of the Connesian variety. (Connes himself
has already commented there.) We mentioned a couple of weeks ago that
there are different flavours of noncommutative geometry. The
Kontsevichian variety, nongeometry, finds its blog voice in Lieven Le
Bruyn’s NeverEndingBooks. It would be interesting to see some
interaction.

I don’t think I will opt for a dialectic
response to the Noncommutative Geometry Blog, although I realize this would result
in more enjoyable reading for some of you…

For starters,
I’ve signed up to another flagship of noncommutative
_differential_ geometry : noncommutativegeometry.net, though it is unclear to me what action (if any) is
going on over there.

Further, I plan to move my talks at the master class
noncommutative geometry
to the virtual lecture room of this blog,
hoping to get the desired interaction. We’ll start later this week and
the pace will be pretty easy going. A tentative title might be
“Anabelian versus Noncommutative Geometry”.

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bookmarks tuesday cleanup


Geeky Mom : Why am I blogging?
. Been there before. Sooner or later
all non-pseudonomenous bloggers are faced with the same dilemmas.
There’s really no answer or advice to give except : blog when you feel
like it, if not do something different, after all its just one of those
billion of blogs around.

Texmaker : another
LaTeX-frontend, possibly having a few extras such as : a structure-pane
including labels you gave to formulas, theorems etc. (click on them
brings you to them). Intend to use it now as I’m in another rewrite of
the never-ending-book..

Microformats : “Designed for
humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open
data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.” May
have another look.

Quicksilver : a recurring
link. At times when I feel learning key-strokes may save me a lot of
time I have (another) go at Quicksilver. Last week, Ive reinstalled this
blog more or less post by post and used keystrokes to send a line in the
SQL-file of the database dump of NEB as a clipping to Scrivener to
MultiMarkdown it further. I used the app Service Scrubber
to define my own key-strokes. Must have another go at Quicksilver soon.
Im sure it distinguishes ‚”power mac users” from the rest of
us.


List of GTDTools
: a good list of GTD-software. I’m probably just
too chaotic for GTD to improve my workflow but somehow I cannot resist
trying some of these things out.

LifeDEV : One of those sites that tells
me I should take GTD more seriously

DoIt : One of
these GTD-tools. It is said to go well with Quicksilver, so maybe, one
day.

Think
: Here a little seemingly completely useless tool which works well (at
least for me). No, it does not make you think, but at least it helps you
while you are thinking (or doing anything a bit focussed). Install it
and enjoy! The principle is that it just blocks out all other open
windows (and there are keystrokes (yes, again) to get you quickly in
and out.) Besides, it looks great. It’s in my dock and this says it
all

Thinkature :
a brainstorming tool. Dont know why I did bookmark this. Perhaps one
day, a few years from now

Stafford Talk :
a talk by Toby Stafford I came across by accident. Maybe there are other
interesting talks on the site?

Science Scouts : a great
idea! Give yourself badges for how well you do science (or talk/write
about science). Have to collect my badges soon. I’m sure this only
works for people with a scouting-history, but who
knows?

MacResearch : Here’s a site
that may become useful. MacResearch.org is an open and independent
community for scientists using Mac OS X and related hardware in their
research. It is the mission of this site to cultivate a knowledgeable
and vibrant community of researchers to exchange ideas and information,
and collectively escalate the prominence of Apple technologies in the
scientific research community. They have some interesting articles
and tutorials on e.g. DevonThink and BibDesk etc. Worth to
revisit.

Jennifer in love : well‚ should I say something about this?
probably best not.


Breakthrough CLI
: another pamphlet in favor of the Command Line! A
must read for those who perfer GUIs to CLIs.

<

p>CLI – the
site
: Rod is working hard on CLI-20. Whenever he releases version
2.0, neverendingbooks will be among the first sites to run it. I still
love the idea.

Why do I bother? : an n-category post I got briefly interested in,
but was somehow flooded by professional
math-philosophers

Newton Legacy Reviewed : just that, a first review
on the next bookmark.

the Newton
Legacy
: a free online book, a murder mystery with a physics touch.
Perhaps this is the best investment of time/energy : write a popular
science book rather than another paper. Read half way through it (sorry
but not the best prose Ive read so far), may continue but was held up
reading a (real) murder mystery Equinox featuring also Newton and
alchemy (must be in the air somehow), also not the best mystery read
so far

Stalking with Googleearth
: no comment

(to be continued)

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master class 2007

Next
week our master programme on noncommutative geometry
will start. Here is the list of all international mini-courses (8 hours
each) and firm or tentative dates. For the latest update, it is always
best to check with the Arts seminar
website
.

  • Hans-Juergen Schneider (Munich) “Hopf Galois extensions and
    quotient theory of Hopf algebras”. February 20-23 each day from
    10h30-12h30.

  • Markus Reineke
    (Wuppertal) “Representations of quivers”. February 27-28, March 1-2
    each day from 10h30-12h30.


  • Arthur Ruuge
    (Moscow) “Semiclassical approximation of quantum
    mechanics”. March 6-9 each day from 10h30-12h30.
  • Rupert Yu
    (Poitiers) in March or April.
  • Isar Stubbe (Antwerp) in April.
  • Fred Van Oystayen (Antwerp) in April.
  • Raf
    Bocklandt (Antwerp) in April or May.
  • Goro Kato (Los Angeles)
    in May.
  • Florin Panaite (Bucharest) in May.
  • Pjotr
    Hajac (Warsaw) in June.

Apart from these mini-courses
there will be four regular courses (approx. 30hrs each) during the whole
semester.

  • Raf Bocklandt “Knot theory”.
  • Lieven Le Bruyn “Noncommutative geometry”.
  • Geert Van
    de Weyer “Quantum groups”.
  • Fred Van Oysyaeyen
    “Noncommutative algebra”.

<

p>Dates and places of all
lectures will be made available through the Arts seminar
site
.

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