

(birth announcement card)
Today, our youngest daughter (aka PD2 on this blog) gave birth to a little boy, Gust.
I’m in transition, trying to adjust to this new phase in our lives.
This semester I’m teaching a first course in representation theory. On campus, IRL! It’s a bit strange, using a big lecture room for a handful of students, everyone wearing masks, keeping distances, etc.
So far, this is their only course on campus, so it has primarily a social function. The breaks in between are infinitely more important than the lectures themselves. I’d guess breaks take up more than one third of the four hours scheduled.
At first, I hoped to make groups and their representations relevant by connecting to the crisis at hand, whence the the symmetries of Covid-19 post, and the Geometry of Viruses series of posts.
Not a great idea. I guess most of us are by now over-saturated with Corona-related news, and if students are allowed to come to campus just one afternoon per week, the last thing they want to hear about is, right, Covid.
So I need to change tactics. By now we’ve reached the computation of character tables, and googling around I found this MathOverflow-topic: Fun applications of representations of finite groups.
The highest rated answer, by Vladimir Dotsenko, suggests a problem attributed to Kirillov:
An example from Kirillov’s book on representation theory: write numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6 on the faces of a cube, and keep replacing (simultaneously) each number by the average of its neighbours. Describe (approximately) the numbers on the faces after many iterations.
A bit further down the list, the Lecture notes on representation theory by Vera Serganova are mentioned. They start off with a variation of Kirillov’s question (and an extension of it to the dodecahedron):
Hungry knights. There are n hungry knights at a round table. Each of them has a plate with certain amount of food. Instead of eating every minute each knight takes one half of his neighbors servings. They start at 10 in the evening. What can you tell about food distribution in the morning?
Breakfast at Mars. It is well known that marsians have four arms, a standard family has 6 persons and a breakfast table has a form of a cube with each person occupying a face on a cube. Do the analog of round table problem for the family of marsians.
Supper at Venus. They have five arms there, 12 persons in a family and sit on the faces of a dodecahedron (a regular polyhedron whose faces are pentagons).
Perhaps the nicest exposition of the problem (and its solution!) is in the paper Dragons eating kasha by Tanya Khovanova.
Suppose a four-armed dragon is sitting on every face of a cube. Each dragon has a bowl of kasha in front of him. Dragons are very greedy, so instead of eating their own kasha, they try to steal kasha from their neighbors. Every minute every dragon extends four arms to the four neighboring faces on the cube and tries to get the kasha from the bowls there. As four arms are fighting for every bowl of
kasha, each arm manages to steal one-fourth of what is in the bowl. Thus each
dragon steals one-fourth of the kasha of each of his neighbors, while at the same
time all of his own kasha is stolen. Given the initial amounts of kasha in every
bowl, what is the asymptotic behavior of the amounts of kasha?
I can give them quick hints to reach the solution:
But, I can never explain it better than Khovanova’s treatment of the kasha-eating dragons problem.
Leave a Commentand for everyone else feeling a bit lost in these tiring times.
Photo credit: @itoldmythe
Leave a CommentThe one thing harder than to start blogging after a long period of silence is to stop when you think you’re still in the flow.
(image credit Putnam Consulting)
The Januari 1st post a math(arty) 2018 was an accident. I only wanted to share this picture, of a garage-door with an uncommon definition of prime numbers, i saw the night before.
I had been working on a better understanding of Conway’s Big Picture so I had material for a few follow-up posts.
It was never my intention to start blogging on a daily basis.
I had other writing plans for 2018.
For years I’m trying to write a math-book for a larger audience, or at least to give it an honest try.
My pet peeve with such books is that most of them are either devoid of proper mathematical content, or focus too much on the personal lives of the mathematicians involved.
An inspiring counter-example is ‘Closing the gap’ by Vicky Neal.
From the excellent review by Colin Beveridge on the Aperiodical Blog:
“Here’s a clever way to structure a maths book (I have taken copious notes): follow the development of a difficult idea or discovery chronologically, but intersperse the action with background that puts the discovery in context. That’s not a new structure – but it’s tricky to pull off: you have to keep the difficult idea from getting too difficult, and keep the background at a level where an interested reader can follow along and either say “yes, that’s plausible” or better “wait, let me get a pen!”. This is where Closing The Gap excels.”
So it is possible to publish a math-book worth writing. Or at least, some people can pull it off.
Problem was I needed to kick myself into writing mode. Feeling forced to post something daily wouldn’t hurt.
Anyway, I was sure this would have to stop soon. I had plans to disappear for 10 days into the French mountains. Our place there suffers from frequent power- and cellphone-cuts, which can last for days.
Thank you Orange.fr for upgrading your network to the remotest of places. At times, it felt like I was working from home.
I kept on blogging.
Even now, there’s material lying around.
I’d love to understand the claim that non-commutative geometry may offer some help in explaining moonshine. There was an interesting question on an older post on nimber-arithmetic I feel I should be following up. I’ve given a couple of talks recently on $\mathbb{F}_1$-material, parts of which may be postable. And so on.
Problem is, I would stick to the same (rather dense) writing style.
Perhaps it would make more sense to aim for a weekly (or even monthly) post over at Medium.
Medium offers no MathJax support forcing me to write differently about maths, and for a broader potential audience.
I may continue to blog here (or not), stick to the current style (or try something differently). I have not the foggiest idea right now.
If you have suggestions or advice, please leave a comment or email me.
Leave a CommentIt took us some time to clear the array of old chestnut trees.
But it paid off. A good harvest easily gives half a ton of chestnuts, including some rare, older varieties.
In the autumn, the coloured leaves make a spectacular view. Now it looks rather desolate.
But, the wind piles up the fallen leaves in every nook, cranny, corner or entrance possible.
My day in the mountains: ‘harvesting’ fallen leaves…
Leave a CommentPlease allow for a couple of end-of-semester bluesy ramblings. I just finished grading the final test of the last of five courses I lectured this semester.
Most of them went, I believe, rather well.
As always, it was fun to teach an introductory group theory course to second year physics students.
Personally, I did enjoy our Lie theory course the most, given for a mixed public of both mathematics and physics students. We did the spin-group $SU(2)$ and its connection with $SO_3(\mathbb{R})$ in gruesome detail, introduced the other classical groups, and proved complete reducibility of representations. The funnier part was applying this to the $U(1) \times SU(2) \times SU(3)$-representation of the standard model and its extension to the $SU(5)$ GUT.
Ok, but with a sad undertone, was the second year course on representations of finite groups. Sad, because it was the last time I’m allowed to teach it. My younger colleagues decided there’s no place for RT on the new curriculum.
Soit.
The final lecture is often an eye-opener, or at least, I hope it is/was.
Here’s the idea: someone whispers in your ear that there might be a simple group of order $60$. Armed with only the Sylow-theorems and what we did in this course we will determine all its conjugacy classes, its full character table, and finish proving that this mysterious group is none other than $A_5$.
Right now I’m just a tad disappointed only a handful of students came close to solving the same problem for order $168$ this afternoon.
Clearly, I gave them ample extra information: the group only has elements of order $1,2,3,4$ and $7$ and the centralizer of one order $2$ element is the dihedral group of order $8$. They had to determine the number of distinct irreducible representations, that is, the number of conjugacy classes. Try it yourself (Solution at the end of this post).
For months I felt completely deflated on Tuesday nights, for I had to teach the remaining two courses on that day.
There’s this first year Linear Algebra course. After teaching for over 30 years it was a first timer for me, and probably for the better. I guess 15 years ago I would have been arrogant enough to insist that the only way to teach linear algebra properly was to do representations of quivers…
Now, I realise that linear algebra is perhaps the only algebra course the majority of math-students will need in their further career, so it is best to tune its contents to the desires of the other colleagues: inproducts, determinants as volumes, Markov-processes and the like.
There are thousands of linear algebra textbooks, the one feature they all seem to lack is conciseness. What kept me going throughout this course was trying to come up with the shortest proofs ever for standard results. No doubt, next year the course will grow on me.
Then, there was a master course on algebraic geometry (which was supposed to be on scheme theory, moduli problems such as the classification of fat points (as in the car crash post, etale topology and the like) which had a bumpy start because class was less prepared on varieties and morphisms than I had hoped for.
Still, judging on the quality of the papers students are beginning to hand in (today I received one doing serious stuff with stacks) we managed to cover a lot of material in the end.
I’m determined to teach that first course on algebraic geometry myself next year.
Which brought me wondering about the ideal content of such a course.
Half a decade ago I wrote a couple of posts such as Mumford’s treasure map, Grothendieck’s functor of points, Manin’s geometric axis and the like, which are still quite readable.
In the functor of points-post I referred to a comment thread Algebraic geometry without prime ideals at the Secret Blogging Seminar.
As I had to oversee a test this afternoon, I printed out all comments (a full 29 pages!) and had a good time reading them. At the time I favoured the POV advocated by David Ben-Zvi and Jim Borger (functor of points instead of locally ringed schemes).
Clearly they are right, but then so was I when I thought the ‘right’ way to teach linear algebra was via quiver-representations…
We’ll see what I’ll try out next year.
You may have wondered about the title of this post. It’s derived from a paper Raf Bocklandt (of the Korteweg-de Vries Institute in Amsterdam) arXived some days ago: Reflections in a cup of coffee, which is an extended version of a Brouwer-lecture he gave. Raf has this to say about the Brouwer fixed-point theorem.
“The theorem is usually explained in worldly terms by looking at a cup of coffee. In this setting it states that no matter how you stir your cup, there will always be a point in the liquid that did not change position and if you try to move that part by further stirring you will inevitably move some other part back into its original position. Legend even has it that Brouwer came up with the idea while stirring in a real cup, but whether this is true we’ll never know. What is true however is that Brouwers refections on the topic had a profound impact on mathematics and would lead to lots of new developments in geometry.”
I wish you all a pleasant end of 2016 and a much better 2017.
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As to the 168-solution: Sylow says there are 8 7-Sylows giving 48 elements of order 7. The centralizer of each of them must be $C_7$ (given the restriction on the order of elements) so two conjugacy classes of them. Similarly each conjugacy class of an order 3 element must contain 56 elements. There is one conjugacy class of an order 2 element having 21 elements (because the centralizer is $D_4$) giving also a conjugacy class of an order 4 element consisting of 42 elements. Together with the identity these add up to 168 so there are 6 irreducible representations.
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