Return to LaTeX
on February 12, 2010 by lieven in iMath, Comments (3)
To most mathematicians, a good LaTeX-frontend (such as TeXShop for Mac-users) is the crucial tool to get the work done. We use it to draft ideas, write papers and courses, or even to take notes during lectures.
However, after six years of blogging, my own LaTeX-routine became rusty. I rarely open a new tex-document, and [...]
Where’s Bourbaki’s Escorial?
on February 8, 2010 by lieven in Bourbaki, Comments (0)
As explained in the bumpy-road-post, Andre Weil and Evelyne Gillet became involved sometime in 1935. Early 1936, they made a pre-honeymooning trip to Spain and visited El Escorial. Weil was so taken by the place that he planned the next Bourbaki-conference to be held in a nearby college.
However, the Bourbakis never made it to to [...]
Lambda-rings for formula-phobics
on February 5, 2010 by lieven in geometry, numbers, Comments (1)
In 1956, Alexander Grothendieck (middle) introduced -rings in an algebraic-geometric context to be commutative rings A equipped with a bunch of operations (for all numbers ) satisfying a list of rather obscure identities. From the easier ones, such as
to those expressing and via specific universal polynomials. An attempt to capture [...]
Seating the first few thousand Knights
on February 3, 2010 by lieven in games, groups, Comments (0)
The odd Knights of the round table-problem asks for a specific one-to-one correspondence between two realizations of ‘the’ algebraic closure of the field of two elements.
The first identifies the multiplicative group of its non-zero elements with the group of all odd complex roots of unity, under complex multiplication. The addition on is then [...]
big Witt vectors for everyone (1/2)
on February 2, 2010 by lieven in geometry, numbers, Comments (1)
Next time you visit your math-library, please have a look whether these books are still on the shelves : Michiel Hazewinkel’s Formal groups and applications, William Fulton’s and Serge Lange’s Riemann-Roch algebra and Donald Knutson’s lambda-rings and the representation theory of the symmetric group.
I wouldn’t be surprised if one or more of these books are [...]
The odd knights of the round table
on January 28, 2010 by lieven in games, geometry, groups, numbers, Comments (0)
Here’s a tiny problem illustrating our limited knowledge of finite fields : “Imagine an infinite queue of Knights , waiting to be seated at the unit-circular table. The master of ceremony (that is, you) must give Knights and a place at an odd root of unity, say and , such that the [...]
Olivier Messiaen & Mathieu 12
on December 31, 2009 by lieven in Bourbaki, general, groups, Comments (5)
To mark the end of 2009 and 6 years of blogging, two musical compositions with a mathematical touch to them. I wish you all a better 2010!
Remember from last time that we identified Olivier Messiaen as the ‘Monsieur Modulo’ playing the musical organ at the Bourbaki wedding. This was based on the fact that his [...]
Seriously now, where was the Bourbaki wedding?
on November 25, 2009 by lieven in Bourbaki, Comments (2)
A few days before Halloween, Norbert Dufourcq (who supposedly died on december 17th 1990…), sent me a comment, filled with useful info, and hinting I did mess up big time in the previous post…
Norbert Dufourcq, an organist and student of André Marchal, the organist-in-charge at the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church in 1939, the place where I speculated [...]
Where was the Bourbaki wedding?
on October 26, 2009 by lieven in Bourbaki, Comments (7)
I’m pretty certain I got the intended date & time of the Bourbaki-Pétard wedding right : June 3rd 1939 at 12h. Finding the exact location of the wedding-ceremony is an entirely different matter. And, quite probably, we are reading way too much in these pranks of the Weil-clan.
Still, it’s fun trying to find an [...]
the bumpy road to the first Bourbaki congress
on October 22, 2009 by lieven in Bourbaki, Comments (1)
Because Mandelbrojt, de Possel and Coulomb all held a position at the University Blaise Pascal of Clermont-Ferrand I assumed that the Bourbaki-group had no problem procuring the universities’ biology-outpost in Besse-en-Chandesse for their first congress in 1935. However, the relevant Bourbaki files tell a different story. As might have been expected, the project suffered from [...]
Hi, I'm a professor of mathematics at the University of Antwerp, in Belgium. My research areas are non-commutative algebra and non-commutative geometry. Sometimes, you can also find me here :
