This week i was at the conference Noncommutative Algebraic Geometry and its Applications to Physics at the Lorentz center in Leiden. It was refreshing to go to a conference where i knew only a handful of people beforehand and where everything was organized to Oberwolfach perfection. Perhaps i’ll post someday on some of the (to me) more interesting talks. Also… Read more →
Almost three decades ago, Yuri Manin submitted the paper “New dimensions in geometry” to the 25th Arbeitstagung, Bonn 1984. It is published in its proceedings, Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1111, 59-101 and there’s a review of the paper available online in the Bulletin of the AMS written by Daniel Burns. In the introduction Manin makes some highly speculative but… Read more →
I’ve LaTeXed $48=2 \times 24$ posts into a 114 page booklet Monsters and Moonshine for you to download. The $24$ ‘Monsters’ posts are (mostly) about finite simple (sporadic) groups : we start with the Scottish solids (hoax?), move on to the 14-15 game groupoid and a new Conway $M_{13}$-sliding game which uses the sporadic Mathieu group $M_{12}$. This Mathieu group… Read more →
Last fall, Matilde Marcolli gave a course at CalTech entitled Oral Presentation: The (Martial) Art of Giving Talks. The purpose of this course was to teach students “how to effectively communicate their work in seminars and conferences and how to defend it from criticism from the audience”. The lecture notes contain basic information on the different types of talks and… Read more →
I’ve never apologized for prolonged periods of blogsilence and have no intention to start now. But, sometimes you need to expose the things holding you back before you can turn the page and (hopefully) start afresh. Long time readers of this blog know I’ve often warned against group-think, personality cults and the making of exaggerate claims as possible threats to… Read more →
Here are the scans of my crude prep-notes for some of the later seminar-talks. These notes still contain mistakes, most of them were corrected during the talks. So, please, read these notes with both mercy are caution! Hurwitz formula imples ABC : The proof of Smirnov’s argument, but modified so that one doesn’t require an $\epsilon$-term. This is known to… Read more →
October 21st : Dear Diary, today’s seminar was fun, though a bit unconventional. The intention was to explain faithfully flat descent, but at the last moment i had the crazy idea to let students discover the main idea themselves (in the easiest of examples) by means of this thought experiment : “I am an alien, and a very stubborn alien… Read more →
We’ve had three seminar-sessions so far, and the seminar-blog ‘angs+’ contains already 20 posts and counting. As blogging is not a linear activity, I will try to post here at regular intervals to report on the ground we’ve covered in the seminar, providing links to the original angs+ posts. This year’s goal is to obtain a somewhat definite verdict on… Read more →
In Belgium the hashtag-craze of the moment is #cestjoelle. Joelle Milquet is perceived to be the dark force behind everything, from the crisis in Greece, over DSK, to your mother-in-law coming over this weekend? #cestjoelle. Sam Leith used the same meme in his book the coincidence engine. A hurricane assembling a passenger jet out of old bean-cans? #cestGrothendieck All shops… Read more →
F_un Mathematics Hardly a ‘new’ blog, but one that is getting a new life! On its old homepage you’ll find a diagonal banner stating ‘This site has moved’ and clicking on it will guide you to its new location : cage.ugent.be/~kthas/Fun. From now on, this site will be hosted at the University of Ghent and maintained by Koen Thas. So,… Read more →
In the early days of math-blogging, one was happy to get LaTeXRender working. Some years later, the majority of math-blogs were using the, more user-friendly, wp-latex plugin to turn LaTeX-code into png-images. Today, everyone uses MathJax which works with modern CSS and web fonts instead of equation images, so equations scale with surrounding text at all zoom levels. However, MathJax… Read more →
Note to students following this year’s ‘seminar noncommutative geometry’ : the seminar starts friday september 30th at 13h in room G 0.16. However, if you have another good reason to be in Ghent on thursday september 22nd, consider attending the inaugural lecture of Koen Thas at 17h in auditorium Emmy Noether, campus De Sterre, Krijgslaan 281, 9000 Gent. Koen’s lecture… Read more →
If you’ve downloaded recently the little booklet containing the collection of my posts on the Bourbaki code, either in pdf- or epub-format, cherish it. I have taken all Bourbaki-code posts offline (that is, changed their visibility from ‘Public’ to ‘Private’). Here’s why. Though all speculations and the few ‘discoveries’ in these posts are entirely my own work, I did benefit… Read more →
Perhaps, the tips and tricks I did receive to turn a selection of wordpress-posts into a proper ePub-file may be of use to others, so I will describe the procedure here in some detail. It makes a difference whether or not some of the posts contain TeX. This time, I’ll sketch the process for non-LaTeX posts and hence we will… Read more →
There were some great comments by Peter before this post was taken offline. So, here they are, once again. Read more →