about 7 months ago - 2 comments
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
about 7 months ago - No comments
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 seat at the
about 10 months ago - No comments
Over the week-end I read The artist and the mathematician (subtitle : The story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the genius mathematician who never existed) by Amir D. Aczel. Whereas the central character of the book should be Bourbaki, it focusses more on two of Bourbaki’s most colorful members, André Weil and Alexander Grothendieck, and the many
about 11 months ago - No comments
A comment-thread well worth following while on vacation was Algebraic Geometry without Prime Ideals at the Secret Blogging Seminar. Peter Woit became lyric about it : My nomination for the all-time highest quality discussion ever held in a blog comment section goes to the comments on this posting at Secret Blogging Seminar, where several of
about 1 year ago - 2 comments
The Grothendieck circle is a great resource to find published as well as unpublished texts by Alexander Grothendieck. One of the text I was unaware of is his Introduction to Functorial Algebraic Geometry, a set of notes written up by Federico Gaeta based on tape-recordings (!) of an 100-hour course given by Grothendieck in Buffalo,
about 1 year ago - 3 comments
It all started with this comment on the noncommutative geometry blog by “gabriel” : Even though my understanding of noncommutative geometry is limited, there are some aspects that I am able to follow. I was wondering, since there are so few blogs here, why don’t you guys forge an alliance with neverending books, you blog
about 1 year ago - No comments
Probably the smartest move I’ve made after entering math-school was to fall in love with a feminist. Yeah well, perhaps I’ll expand a bit on this sentence another time. For now, suffice it to say that I did pick up a few words in the process, among them : the queen bee syndrome : women
about 1 year ago - 3 comments
Boy, do I feel stupid for having written close to 500 blog-posts hoping (in vain) they might eventually converge into a book project… Gil Kalai is infinitely smarter. Get a fake gmail account, invent a fictitious character and start COMMENTING and provoking responses. That’s how “Gina” appeared on the scene, cut and pasted her comments
about 1 year ago - 4 comments
Creating (or taking) an image and explaining how it depicts your mental picture of a noncommutative space is one thing. Ideally, the image should be strong enough so that other people familiar with it might have a reasonable guess what you attempt to depict. But, is there already enough concordance in our views of noncommutative
about 1 year ago - 4 comments
I really like Matilde Marcolli’s idea to use some of Jackson Pollock’s paintings as metaphors for noncommutative spaces. In her talk she used this painting and refered to it (as did I in my post) as : Jackson Pollock “Untitled N.3”. Before someone writes a post ‘The Pollock noncommutative space hoax’ (similar to my own
geometry, noncommutative
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 :
