-
We sit in our ivory towers and think
I’m on vacation, and re-reading two ‘metabiographies’: Philippe Douroux : Alexandre Grothendieck : Sur les traces du dernier génie des mathématiques and Siobhan Roberts : Genius At Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway . Siobhan Roberts’ book is absolutely brilliant! I’m reading it for the n-th time, first on Kindle, then hardcopy, and…
-
Smullyan and the President’s sanity
Smullyan found himself in a very strange country indeed! All the inhabitants of this country are completely truthful – they always tell you honestly what they believe, but the trouble is that about half of the population are totally mad, and all their beliefs are wrong! The other half are totally sane and accurate in…
-
The joys of running a WordPress blog
Earlier today, John Duncan (of moonshine fame) emailed he was unable to post a comment to the previous post: “I went to post a comment but somehow couldn’t convince the website to cooperate.” There’s little point in maintaining a self-hosted blog if people cannot comment on it. If you tried, you got this scary message:…
-
Stirring a cup of coffee
Please 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…
-
Je (ne) suis (pas) Mochizuki
Apologies to Joachim Roncin, the guy who invented the slogan “Je suis Charlie”, for this silly abuse of his logo: I had hoped the G+ post below of end december would have been the last I had to say on this (non)issue: (btw. embedded G+-post below, not visible in feeds) A quick recap : –…