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Tag: blogging

the future of this blog

Published August 6, 2008 by lievenlb

Some weeks ago Peter Woit of Not Even Wrong and Bee of Backreaction had a video-chat on all sorts of things (see the links above to see the whole clip) including the nine minute passage below on ‘the future of (science) blogs’.

click here to see the video

The crucial point being that blogging takes time and that one often feels that the time invested might have been better spend doing other things. Bee claims it doesn’t take her that long to write a post, but given their quality, I would be surprised if it took her less than one to two hours on average.

Speaking for myself, I’ve uploaded two (admittedly short) notes to the arXiv recently. The shorter one took me less time than an average blogpost, the longer one took me about the time I need for one of the better posts. So, is it really justified to invest that amount of time in something as virtual as a blog?

Probably it all depends on the type of blog you’re running and what goal (if any) you want to achieve with it.

I can see the point in setting up a blog connected to a book you once wrote or intend to write (such as Not Even Wrong or Terry Tao).

I can also understand that people start a blog to promote their research-topic or to have a social function for people interested in the same topic (such as Noncommutative Geometry or the n-category cafe).

I can even imagine the energy boost resulting from setting up a group-blog with fellow researchers working at the same place (such as Secret Blogging Seminar or the Everything Seminar and some others).

So, there are plenty of good reasons to start and keep investing in a serious mathematical blog (as opposed to mere link-blogs (I won’t mention examples) or standard-textbook-excerpts-blogs (again, I’ll refrain from giving examples)).

What is needed is either a topical focus or a clear medium term objective. Unfortunately, this blog has neither…

At present, I feel like the journalist, spending too much time getting into a subject merely to write a short piece on it for today’s paper, which will be largely forgotten by tomorrow, but still hoping that his better writings will result into something having a longer half-life…

That is, I need to reconsider the future of this blog and will do so over a short vacation. As always, suggestions you might have are welcome. Perhaps I should take the bait offered by John McKay in his comment yesterday and do a series on the illusory 24-dimensional monster-manifold.

At the very least it would take this blog back to the only time when it was somewhat focussed on a single topic and was briefly called MoonshineMath. But then, even this is not without risks…



7 Comments

GAMAP 2008

Published July 7, 2008 by lievenlb

Next week, our annual summer school Geometric and Algebraic Methods with Applications in Physics will start, once again (ive lost count which edition it is).

Because Isar is awol to la douce France, I’ll be responsible (once again) for the web-related stuff of the meeting. So, here a couple of requests to participants/lecturers :

  • if you are giving a mini-course and would like to have your material online, please contact me and i’ll make you an author of the Arts blog.
  • if you are a student attending the summerschool and would love to do some Liveblogging about the meeting, please do the same.

I’ll try to do some cross-posting here when it comes to my own lectures (and, perhaps, a few others). For now, I settled on ‘What is noncommutative geometry?’ as a preliminary title, but then, I’m in the position to change the program with a few keystrokes, so I’ll probably change it by then (or remove myself from it altogether…).

At times, I feel it would be more fun to do a few talks on Math-blogging. An entertaining hour could be spend on the forensic investigation of the recent Riemann-Hypothesis-hype in (a good part of) the math-blogosphere…

One Comment

bloomsday 2 : BistroMath

Published June 16, 2008 by lievenlb

Exactly one year ago this blog was briefly renamed MoonshineMath. The concept being that it would focus on the mathematics surrounding the monster group & moonshine. Well, I got as far as the Mathieu groups…

After a couple of months, I changed the name back to neverendingbooks because I needed the freedom to post on any topic I wanted. I know some people preferred the name MoonshineMath, but so be it, anyone’s free to borrow that name for his/her own blog.

Today it’s bloomsday again, and, as I’m a cyclical guy, I have another idea for a conceptual blog : the bistromath chronicles (or something along this line).

Here’s the relevant section from the Hitchhikers guide

Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behavior of numbers. …
Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe.
This single statement took the scientific world by storm. It completely revolutionized it.So many mathematical conferences got hold in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science of math was put back by years.

Right, so what’s the idea? Well, on numerous occasions Ive stated that any math-blog can only survive as a group-blog. I did approach a lot of people directly, but, as you have noticed, without too much success… Most of them couldnt see themselves contributing to a blog for one of these reasons : it costs too much energy and/or it’s way too inefficient. They say : career-wise there are far cleverer ways to spend my energy than to write a blog. And… there’s no way I can argue against this.

Whence plan B : set up a group-blog for a fixed amount of time (say one year), expect contributors to write one or two series of about 4 posts on their chosen topic, re-edit the better series afterwards and turn them into a book.

But, in order to make a coherent book proposal out of blog-post-series, they’d better center around a common theme, whence the BistroMath ploy. Imagine that some of these forgotten “restaurant-check-notes” are discovered, decoded and explained. Apart from the mathematics, one is free to invent new recepies or add descriptions of restaurants with some mathematical history, etc. etc.

One possible scenario (but I’m sure you will have much better ideas) : part of the knotation is found on a restaurant-check of some Italian restaurant. This allow to explain Conway’s theory of rational tangles, give the perfect way to cook spaghetti to experiment with tangles and tell the history of Manin’s Italian restaurant in Bonn where (it is rumoured) the 1998 Fields medals were decided…

But then, there is no limit to your imagination as long as it somewhat fits within the framework. For example, I’d love to read the transcripts of a chat-session in SecondLife between Dedekind and Conway on the construction of real numbers… I hope you get the drift.

I’m not going to rename neverendingbooks again, but am willing to set up the BistroMath blog provided

  • Five to ten people are interested to participate
  • At least one book-editor shows an interest
    update : (16/06) contacted by first publisher

You can leave a comment or, if you prefer, contact me via email (if you’re human you will have no problem getting my address…).

Clearly, people already blogging are invited and are allowed to cross-post (in fact, that’s what I will do if it ever gets so far). Finally, if you are not willing to contribute blog-posts but like the idea and are willing to contribute to it in any other way, we are still auditioning for chanting monks

The small group of monks who had taken up hanging around the major research institutes singing strange chants to the effect that the Universe was only a figment of its own imagination were eventually given a street theater grant and went away.

And, if you do not like this idea, there will be another bloomsday-idea next year…

One Comment

Looking for F_un

Published June 3, 2008 by lievenlb

There are only a handful of human activities where one goes to extraordinary lengths to keep a dream alive, in spite of overwhelming evidence : religion, theoretical physics, supporting the Belgian football team and … mathematics.

In recent years several people spend a lot of energy looking for properties of an elusive object : the field with one element $\mathbb{F}_1 $, or in French : “F-un”. The topic must have reached a level of maturity as there was a conference dedicated entirely to it : NONCOMMUTATIVE GEOMETRY AND GEOMETRY OVER THE FIELD WITH ONE ELEMENT.

In this series I’d like to find out what the fuss is all about, why people would like it to exist and what it has to do with noncommutative geometry. However, before we start two remarks :

The field $\mathbb{F}_1 $ does not exist, so don’t try to make sense of sentences such as “The ‘field with one element’ is the free algebraic monad generated by one constant (p.26), or the universal generalized ring with zero (p.33)” in the wikipedia-entry. The simplest proof is that in any (unitary) ring we have $0 \not= 1 $ so any ring must contain at least two elements. A more highbrow version : the ring of integers $\mathbb{Z} $ is the initial object in the category of unitary rings, so it cannot be an algebra over anything else.

The second remark is that several people have already written blog-posts about $\mathbb{F}_1 $. Here are a few I know of : David Corfield at the n-category cafe and at his old blog, Noah Snyder at the secret blogging seminar, Kea at the Arcadian functor, AC and K. Consani at Noncommutative geometry and John Baez wrote about it in his weekly finds.

The dream we like to keep alive is that we will prove the Riemann hypothesis one fine day by lifting Weil’s proof of it in the case of curves over finite fields to rings of integers.

Even if you don’t know a word about Weil’s method, if you think about it for a couple of minutes, there are two immediate formidable problems with this strategy.

For most people this would be evidence enough to discard the approach, but, we mathematicians have found extremely clever ways for going into denial.

The first problem is that if we want to think of $\mathbf{spec}(\mathbb{Z}) $ (or rather its completion adding the infinite place) as a curve over some field, then $\mathbb{Z} $ must be an algebra over this field. However, no such field can exist…

No problem! If there is no such field, let us invent one, and call it $\mathbb{F}_1 $. But, it is a bit hard to do geometry over an illusory field. Christophe Soule succeeded in defining varieties over $\mathbb{F}_1 $ in a talk at the 1999 Arbeitstagung and in a more recent write-up of it : Les varietes sur le corps a un element.

We will come back to this in more detail later, but for now, here’s the main idea. Consider an existent field $k $ and an algebra $k \rightarrow R $ over it. Now study the properties of the functor (extension of scalars) from $k $-schemes to $R $-schemes. Even if there is no morphism $\mathbb{F}_1 \rightarrow \mathbb{Z} $, let us assume it exists and define $\mathbb{F}_1 $-varieties by requiring that these guys should satisfy the properties found before for extension of scalars on schemes defined over a field by going to schemes over an algebra (in this case, $\mathbb{Z} $-schemes). Roughly speaking this defines $\mathbb{F}_1 $-schemes as subsets of points of suitable $\mathbb{Z} $-schemes.

But, this is just one half of the story. He adds to such an $\mathbb{F}_1 $-variety extra topological data ‘at infinity’, an idea he attributes to J.-B. Bost. This added feature is a $\mathbb{C} $-algebra $\mathcal{A}_X $, which does not necessarily have to be commutative. He only writes : “Par ignorance, nous resterons tres evasifs sur les proprietes requises sur cette $\mathbb{C} $-algebre.”

The algebra $\mathcal{A}_X $ originates from trying to bypass the second major obstacle with the Weil-Riemann-strategy. On a smooth projective curve all points look similar as is clear for example by noting that the completions of all local rings are isomorphic to the formal power series $k[[x]] $ over the basefield, in particular there is no distinction between ‘finite’ points and those lying at ‘infinity’.

The completions of the local rings of points in $\mathbf{spec}(\mathbb{Z}) $ on the other hand are completely different, for example, they have residue fields of different characteristics… Still, local class field theory asserts that their quotient fields have several common features. For example, their Brauer groups are all isomorphic to $\mathbb{Q}/\mathbb{Z} $. However, as $Br(\mathbb{R}) = \mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z} $ and $Br(\mathbb{C}) = 0 $, even then there would be a clear distinction between the finite primes and the place at infinity…

Alain Connes came up with an extremely elegant solution to bypass this problem in Noncommutative geometry and the Riemann zeta function. He proposes to replace finite dimensional central simple algebras in the definition of the Brauer group by AF (for Approximately Finite dimensional)-central simple algebras over $\mathbb{C} $. This is the origin and the importance of the Bost-Connes algebra.

We will come back to most of this in more detail later, but for the impatient, Connes has written a paper together with Caterina Consani and Matilde Marcolli Fun with $\mathbb{F}_1 $ relating the Bost-Connes algebra to the field with one element.

6 Comments

Writing & Blogging

Published February 27, 2008 by lievenlb

Terry Tao is reworking some of his better blogposts into a book, to be published by the AMS (here’s a preliminary version of the book “What’s New?”)

After some thought, I decided not to transcribe all of my posts from last year (there are 93 of them!), but instead to restrict attention to those articles which (a) have significant mathematical content, (b) are not announcements of material that will be published elsewhere, and (c) are not primarily based on a talk given by someone else. As it turns out, this still leaves about 33 articles from 2007, leading to a decent-sized book of a couple hundred pages in length.

If you have a blog and want to turn it into a LaTeX-book, there’s no need to transcribe or copy every single post, thanks to the WPTeX tool. Note that this is NOT a WP-plugin, but a (simple at that) php-program which turns all posts into a bookcontent.tex file. This file can then be edited further into a proper book.

Unfortunately, the present version chokes on LaTeXrender-code (which is easy enough to solve doing a global ‘find-and-replace’ of the tex-tags by dollar-signs) but worse, on Markdown-code… But then, someone fluent in php-regex will have no problems extending the libs/functions.php file (I hope…).

At the moment I’m considering turning the Mathieu-games-posts into a booklet. A possible title might be Mathieumatical Games. Rereading them (and other posts) I regret to be such an impatient blogger. Often I’m interested in something and start writing posts about it without knowing where or when I’ll land. This makes my posts a lot harder to get through than they might have been, if I would blog only after having digested the material myself… Typical recent examples are the tori-crypto-posts and the Bost-Connes algebra posts.

So, I still have a lot to learn from other bloggers I admire, such as Jennifer Ouellette who maintains the Coctail Party Physics blog. At the moment, Jennifer is resident blogger-journalist at the Kavli Institute where she is running a “Journal Club” workshop giving ideas on how to write better about science.

But the KITP is also committed to fostering scientific communication. That’s where I come in. Each Friday through April 26th, I’ll be presiding over a “Journal Club” meeting focusing on some aspect of communicating science.

Her most recent talk was entitled To Blog or Not to Blog? That is the Question and you can find the slides as well as a QuickTime movie of her talk. They even plan to set up a blog for the participants of the workshop. I will surely follow the rest of her course with keen interest!

3 Comments

valentines_night@intensive_care

Published February 17, 2008 by lievenlb

Not your idea of a romantic evening out? Neither it’s mine, but then, sometimes shit happens…

Blogging and monitoring this server’s status are no priorities at the moment, so please switch to RSS-syndication, if you haven’t done it already.

ps. all’s fine now and, I’ll be back.

6 Comments

quotes of the day

Published February 1, 2008 by lievenlb

Some people are in urgent need of a vacation, myself included…

From the paper Transseries for beginners by G.A. Edgar, arXived today :

Well, brothers and sisters, I am here today to tell you: If you love these formulas,
you need no longer hide in the shadows! The answer to all of these woes is here.
Transseries.

In a comment over at The Everthing Seminar

Shouldn’t dwarfs on the shoulders on giants be a little less arrogant?

by Micromegas.
Well, I’d rather enter a flame war than report about it. But, for some reason I cannot comment at the EverythingSeminar, nor at the SecretBloggingSeminar. Is this my problem or something to do with wordpress.com blogs? If you encountered a similar problem and managed to solve it, please let me know.

UPDATE (febr. 2) : my comment did surface after 5 days. Greg fished it out of their spam-filter. Thanks! I’ll try to comment at wordpress.com blogs from now on by NOT linking to neverendingbooks. I hope this will satisfy their spam-filter…

11 Comments

please, use this bookmarklet!

Published January 21, 2008 by lievenlb

Great! You’ve finally managed to arXiv your paper after months of laborious research, and now, you’re eagerly awaiting response…

The odds are you’ll be disappointed, if not frustrated. Chances are high that if you get any response at all it is only to clarify that someone else (usually the person emailing you) proved this result a long time ago, or that your result could be generalized enormously, or that you could have shortened your proof tremendously if only you were more educated, or …
Mathematics seems to be more of a pissing contest than anything else, at such moments.

Imagine someone would be kind enough, at that particular moment, to send you an email saying not much more than : “Gee thanks! Ive just browsed through your paper arXived today and you really made my day! Keep up the good work, all the best :: lieven” (change the name to your liking)

Sadly, math-circles are not known for their ‘good-vibes’ generally. Mind you, Ive send similar emails to people posting on the arXiv, but, admittedly, I did it far fewer than I might have. Often I like (even admire) a result but repress the urgent need to communicate that feeling to the author, perhaps my Asperger kicking up…

Now that you may feel some empathy with the situation, let’s get to a similar situation in math-blogging. Sometimes, you spend a lot of time writing a post (( but probably you have to be blogging yourself to appreciate the amount of energy it takes to write a genuine post compared to a link-post or a couple-of-lines-not-going-into-the-specifics post )) , release it to the world, see tons of RSS-bots and genuine hits passing by and then what?… nothing! no reply, no email, no comment, nothing at all!

Personally, I’m not that influenced by this. When I blog I do it because (1) Ive the time, at that particular moment and (2) I like to write about the things I do, at that moment. But sometimes, it comes to us all, that feeling of ‘why am I doing this after all? can’t I spend my time more sensibly doing something else?’ and when you begin to have these doubts it usually marks the beginning of a long silence at your blog (( browse my archive and I can tell you specifically what happened at that particular moment to stop blogging ))

So, here’s an appeal to all you lurkers at math-blogs : give these people, once in a while, something back…. Ive thought for a long time that this lurk-but-no-comment attitude was something typical of mathematicians, but, as often, when researched in more depth, I have to admit that I’m wrong! Read the post Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute by Jakob Nielsen to find out that most blogs act along a 90-9-1 scheme :

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

So, the good news is, it’s not that particular to us autistic mathematicians. But, wouldn’t it be even better if you could do something positive about it? Speaking for myself : often I read a post I like, and (being a semi-pro myself) appreciate the work had to be put into producing such a post, but even then I don’t feel the urge to communicate this positive feeling to the blogger in question. Perhaps, we could accelerate things by having a bookmarklet in your bookmarks-bar that does the following : when you like a post, go to the post-page where you are asked to leave a comment. Hit the bookmarklet and it will automatically fill in your name, URL, email adress and a supporting message along the lines of “Nice post! I’m not so much of a commenter, but rather than not replying at all, I found it important to let you know that people actually read and like your post. All the best (and perhaps later I’ll comment more to the point) :: lieven (again, change the name to your liking).

Well, I’ve just done that! So please take a few minutes off your time to read and follow-up the instructions below and have a math-blog-bookmarklet up in your bookmark-bar to tell the blogger in question you really liked her/his post. This may just be enough motivation for them to carry on…

Okay! Here the nitty-gritty (it takes under 2 minutes, so please, do it now!).

part 1 : copy the following text and save it as blogmarklet.html

  • Download mathblogmarklet.txt and save it into your favorite text-program as bookmarklet.html and change your URL, name, email and custom message (please extend on your compliments…)

  • Once you saved the file as bookmarklet.html open the file under your favourite browser (Safari or Flock) and drag the link to your bookmark-bar.

part 2 : use it!

  • Whenever you visit a blog-post you like, go to the page of that post where you can leave a comment. Hit the bookmarklet and your comment-fields are filled (but PLEASE ADD TO THE DEFAULT COMMENT IF YOU FEEL LIKE IT) and press the submit-button!

  • That’s it!

For example, Ive just changed the layout of this blog. Please leave a specific comment what you think about it.

14 Comments

thanks for linking

Published January 11, 2008 by lievenlb

I’ve re-installed the Google analytics plugin on december 22nd, so it is harvesting data for three weeks only. Still, it is an interesting tool to gain insight in the social networking aspect of math-blogging, something I’m still very bad at…

Below the list of all blogs referring at least 10 times over this last three weeks. In brackets are the number of referrals and included are the average time Avg. they spend on this site, as well as the bounce back rate BB. It gives me the opportunity to link back to some of their posts, as a small token of gratitude. I may repeat this in the future, so please keep on linking…

Not Even Wrong (69) : Avg (1.05 min) BB (52.94%)

The most recent post of Peter is an update on the plagiarism scandal on the arXiv.

The n-category cafe (63) : Avg (2.13 min) BB (50%)

The one series I followed at the cafe lately was the Geometric Representation Theory course run by John Baez and James Dolan. They provide downloadable movies as well as notes.

Richard Borcherd’s blog (47) : Avg (1.53 min) BB (53.19%)

It is great to see that Borcherds has taken up blogging again, with a post on the uselessness of set theory.

The Arcadian functor (32) : Avg (3.45 min) BB (34.38 %)

It is clear from the low bounce-back rate and the high average time spend on this site, that Kea’s readers and mine have common interests. Often I feel that Kea and I are talking about the same topics, but that our language is so different, that it is difficult for me to spot the precise connection. I definitely should start (for myself) a translation-project of her M-theory posts.

RupertGee’s iBlog (23) : Avg (6.48 min) BB (34.7 %)

Surprisingly, and contrasting to my previous rant iTouch-people (or at least those coming here from Rupert Gee’s blog) sure take time to read the posts and look for more.

Ars Mathematica (22) : Avg (0:01 min) BB (77,2 %)

Well, the average time and bounce back rate say it all : people coming here from Ars Mathematica are not interested in longer posts…

iTouch Fans Forum (14) : Avg (2:07 min) BB (42.86 %)

Again, better statistics than I would have expected.

Vivatsgasse 7 (13) : Avg (1:51 min) BB (38.46 %)

I hope these guys haven’t completely given up on blogging as it is one of my favourites.

Sixth form mathematics (12) : Avg (1:40 min) BB (25 %)

My few old posts on LaTeXrender still draw referrals…

Strategic Boards (12) : Avg (0:01 min) BB (91.67 %)

People in strategic board games are not really in my game-posts it seems…

The Everything Seminar (11) : Avg (2:04 min) BB (72.73 %)

Greg Muller has been posting a couple of nice posts on chord diagrams, starting here.

Noncommutative Geometry (11) : Avg (3:36 min) BB (27.27 %)

Well, we are interested in the same thing viewed from different angles, so good average times and a low bounce back rate. Maybe, I should make another attempt to have cross-interaction between the two blogs.

7 Comments

recycled : dessins

Published December 27, 2007 by lievenlb

In a couple of days I’ll be blogging for 4 years… and I’m in the process of resurrecting about 300 posts from a database-dump made in june. For example here’s my first post ever which is rather naive. This conversion program may last for a couple of weeks and I apologize for all unwanted pingbacks it will produce.

I’ll try to convert chunks of related posts in one go, so that I can at least give them correct self-references. Today’s work consisted in rewriting the posts of my virtual course, in march of this year, on dessins d’enfants and its connection to noncommutative geometry (a precursor of what Ive been blogging about recently). These posts were available through the PDF-archive but are from now on open to the internal search-function. Here are the internal links and a short description of their contents

Besides, I’ve added a few scattered old posts, many more to follow…

2 Comments