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Category: stories

driven by ambition and sloth

Published September 3, 2004 by lievenlb

Here’s a part of yesterday’s post by bitch ph.d. :

But first of all I have to figure out what the hell I’m going to teach my graduate students this semester, and really more to the point, what I am not going to bother to try to cram into this class just because it’s my first graduate class and I’m feeling like teaching everything I know in one semester is a realistic and desireable possibility. Yes! Here it all is! Everything I have ever learned! Thank you, and goodnight!

Ah, the perpetual motion machine of last-minute course planning, driven by ambition and sloth!.

I’ve had similar experiences, even with undergraduate courses (in Belgium there is no fixed curriculum so the person teaching the course is responsible for its contents). If you compare the stuff I hoped to teach when I started out with the courses I’ll be giving in a few weeks, you would be more than disappointed.
The first time I taught _differential geometry 1_ (a third year course) I did include in the syllabus everything needed to culminate in an outline of Donaldson’s result on exotic structures on $\mathbb{R}^4 $ and Connes’ non-commutative GUT-model (If you want to have a good laugh, here is the set of notes). As far as I remember I got as far as classifying compact surfaces!
A similar story for the _Lie theory_ course. Until last year this was sort of an introduction to geometric invariant theory : quotient variety of conjugacy classes of matrices, moduli space of linear dynamical systems, Hilbert schemes and the classification of $GL_n $-representations (again, smile! here is the set of notes).
Compared to these (over)ambitious courses, next year’s courses are lazy sunday-afternoon walks! What made me change my mind? I learned the hard way something already known to the ancient Greeks : mathematics does not allow short-cuts, you cannot expect students to run before they can walk. Giving an over-ambitious course doesn’t offer the students a quicker road to research, but it may result in a burn-out before they get even started!

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groen moet!

Published June 5, 2004 by lievenlb

One week to go before the regional and European elections and tension is rising. For me there are two crucial questions : will a racist party get more than 20% of the votes? and will the green party get over the electoral threshold of 5%? If you are not Flemish both probably require some explanation.

A month ago, the extreme right party ‘Vlaams Blok’ was convicted in court for racism and discrimination. They can still participate in the elections because they appealed and Belgian courts are extremely slow. Many people think that this conviction only applies to the party and not to people voting for it. To me, anyone still voting for a party convicted for racism says “I don’t care about society, values and the law!”

Sadly, I wouldn’t be surprised if more than 20% of the electorate will broadcast that message next week. But let us remain optimistic and look at the Vlaams Blog weblogs and their posters ridiculing the Vlaams Blok propaganda.

Then there is the Flemish green party groen!.

Usually they got between 5% and 8% of the votes with one exception in 1999 when they obtained 11%. In 1999 they went into government and among major environmental accomplishments they also voted silly laws such as introducing an electoral threshold of 5%. In last year’s elections they were the first party to be hurt by this when they dived under 4% and had not a single member of parliament left.

I have voted green at every election with one exception : early 80ties the Americans wanted to install cruise missiles in Belgium and with my twenties-naivety I thought to be able to avoid this by casting a strategic (socialist) vote. A traumatic experience because soon afterwards the missiles were flown in…

To me this partly explains the reluctance of groen! to form an alliance with the socialist party as (sadly enough) groen! is run by people of my generation (or older).

Still, in the long run there is no alternative but to form one progressive green-red party. So, I hope that, whatever happens, after the elections competent youngsters such as Tinne Van der Straeten and Els Keytsman will take control of the green party and find equally driven people in the socialist party (not entirely trivial as they seem to specialize in babes whose major accomplishment is the introduction of the sleeveless shirt ministerial look).

In case you wonder : I will vote Tinne Van der Straeten for Europe and Lieve Stallaert for the Flemish
parliament.

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capita selecta

Published April 22, 2004 by lievenlb


Rather than going to the NOG
III Workshop I think it is more fun to give a talk for the Capita
Selecta-course for 2nd year students on “Monstrous Moonshine”. If
I manage to explain to them at least something, I think I am in good
shape for next year\’s Baby Geometry (first year) course. Besides,
afterwards I may decide to give some details of Borcherds\’ solution next year in my 3rd year
Geometry-course…(but this may just be a little bit
over-optimistic).
Anyway, this is what I plan to do in my
lecture : explain both sides of the McKay-observation
that

196 884 = 196 883 + 1

that is, I\’ll give
the action of the modular group on the upper-half plane and prove that
its fundamental domain is just C using the modular j-function (left hand
side) and sketch the importance of the Monster group and its
representation theory (right hand side). Then I\’ll mention Ogg\’s
observation that the only subgroups Gamma(0,p)+ of SL(2,Z)
for which the fundamental domain has genus zero are the prime divisors
p of teh order of the Monster and I\’ll come to moonshine
conjecture of Conway and Norton (for those students who did hear my talk
on Antwerp sprouts, yes both Conway and Simon Norton (via his
SNORT-go) did appear there too…) and if time allows it, I\’ll sketch
the main idea of the proof. Fortunately, Richard Borcherds has written
some excellent expository papers I can use (see his papers-page and I also discovered a beautiful
moonshine-page by Helena Verrill which will make my job a lot
easier.
Btw. yesterday\’s Monster was taken from her other monster story…

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