# neverendingbooks

• ## Huawei and French mathematics

Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant, appears to support (and divide) the French mathematical community. I was surprised to see that Laurent Lafforgue’s affiliation recently changed from ‘IHES’ to ‘Huawei’, for example here as one of the organisers of the Lake Como conference on ‘Unifying themes in geometry’. Judging from this short Huawei-clip (in French) he […]

• ## Do we need the sphere spectrum?

Last time I mentioned the talk “From noncommutative geometry to the tropical geometry of the scaling site” by Alain Connes, culminating in the canonical isomorphism (last slide of the talk) Or rather, what is actually proved in his paper with Caterina Consani BC-system, absolute cyclotomy and the quantized calculus (and which they conjectured previously to…

• ## Alain Connes on his RH-project

In recent months, my primary focus was on teaching and family matters, so I make advantage of this Christmas break to catch up with some of the things I’ve missed. Peter Woit’s blog alerted me to the existence of the (virtual) Lake Como-conference, end of september: Unifying themes in Geometry. In Corona times, virtual conferences…

• ## Imagination and the Impossible

Two more sources I’d like to draw from for this fall’s maths for designers-course: 1. Geometry and the Imagination A fantastic collection of handouts for a two week summer workshop entitled ’Geometry and the Imagination’, led by John Conway, Peter Doyle, Jane Gilman and Bill Thurston at the Geometry Center in Minneapolis, June 1991, based…

• ## Designer Maths

This fall, I’ll be teaching ‘Mathematics for Designers’ to first year students in Architecture. The past few weeks I’ve been looking around for topics to be included in such as course, relevant to architects/artists (not necessarily to engineers/mathematicians). One of the best texts I’ve found on this (perhaps in need of a slight update) is…

• ## phase transition

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.

• ## Lockdown reading : SNORT

In this series I’ll mention some books I found entertaining, stimulating or comforting during these Corona times. Read them at your own risk. This must have been the third time I’ve read The genius in by basement – The biography of a happy man by Alexander masters. I first read it when it came out…

• ## a monstrous unimodular lattice

An integral $n$-dimensional lattice $L$ is the set of all integral linear combinations $L = \mathbb{Z} \lambda_1 \oplus \dots \oplus \mathbb{Z} \lambda_n$ of base vectors $\{ \lambda_1,\dots,\lambda_n \}$ of $\mathbb{R}^n$, equipped with the usual (positive definite) inner product, satisfying $(\lambda, \mu ) \in \mathbb{Z} \quad \text{for all \lambda,\mu \in \mathbb{Z}.}$ But…

• ## Escher’s stairs

Stairways feature prominently in several drawings by Maurits Cornelis (“Mauk”) Escher, for example in this lithograph print Relativity from 1953. Relativity (M. C. Escher) – Photo Credit From its Wikipedia page: In the world of ‘Relativity’, there are three sources of gravity, each being orthogonal to the two others. Each inhabitant lives in one of…

• ## Bourbaki and Grothendieck-Serre

This time of year I’m usually in France, or at least I was before Covid. This might explain for my recent obsession with French math YouTube interviews. Today’s first one is about Bourbaki’s golden years, the period between WW2 and 1975. Alain Connes is trying to get some anecdotes from Jean-Pierre Serre, Pierre Cartier, and…