# Posts Tagged: geometry

• absolute, web

## eBook ‘geometry and the absolute point’ v0.1

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In preparing for next year’s ‘seminar noncommutative geometry’ I’ve converted about 30 posts to LaTeX, centering loosely around the topics students have asked me to cover : noncommutative geometry, the absolute point (aka the field with one element), and their relation to the Riemann hypothesis. The idea being to edit these posts thoroughly, add much… Read more »

• stories

## Art and the absolute point (3)

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Previously, we have recalled comparisons between approaches to define a geometry over the absolute point and art-historical movements, first those due to Yuri I. Manin, subsequently some extra ones due to Javier Lopez Pena and Oliver Lorscheid. In these comparisons, the art trend appears to have been chosen more to illustrate a key feature of… Read more »

• noncommutative

## Penrose tilings and noncommutative geometry

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Penrose tilings are aperiodic tilings of the plane, made from 2 sort of tiles : kites and darts. It is well known (see for example the standard textbook tilings and patterns section 10.5) that one can describe a Penrose tiling around a given point in the plane as an infinite sequence of 0’s and 1’s,… Read more »

• stories

## Who dreamed up the primes=knots analogy?

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One of the more surprising analogies around is that prime numbers can be viewed as knots in the 3-sphere $S^3$. The motivation behind it is that the (etale) fundamental group of $\pmb{spec}(\mathbb{Z}/(p))$ is equal to (the completion) of the fundamental group of a circle $S^1$ and that the embedding $\pmb{spec}(\mathbb{Z}/(p)) \subset \pmb{spec}(\mathbb{Z})$ embeds this circle… Read more »

• absolute, stories

## Art and the absolute point (2)

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Last time we did recall Manin’s comparisons between some approaches to geometry over the absolute point $\pmb{spec}(\mathbb{F}_1)$ and trends in the history of art. In the comments to that post, Javier Lopez-Pena wrote that he and Oliver Lorscheid briefly contemplated the idea of extending Manin’s artsy-dictionary to all approaches they did draw on their Map… Read more »

• absolute, stories

## Art and the absolute point

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In his paper Cyclotomy and analytic geometry over $\mathbb{F}_1$ Yuri I. Manin sketches and compares four approaches to the definition of a geometry over $\mathbb{F}_1$, the elusive field with one element. He writes : “Preparing a colloquium talk in Paris, I have succumbed to the temptation to associate them with some dominant trends in the… Read more »

• noncommutative, web

## Noncommutative algebra and geometry master-degree

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The lecturers, topics and dates of the 6 mini-courses in our ‘advanced master degree 2011 in noncommutative algebra and geometry’ are : February 21-25 Vladimir Bavula (University of Sheffield) : Localization Theory of Rings and Modules March 7-11 Hans-Jürgen Schneider (University of München) : Nichols Algebra and Root Systems April 11-12 Bernhard Keller (Université Paris… Read more »

• web

## mathblogging and poll-results

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Mathblogging.org is a recent initiative and may well become the default starting place to check on the status of the mathematical blogosphere. Handy, if you want to (re)populate your RSS-aggregator with interesting mathematical blogs, is their graphical presentation of (nearly) all math-blogs ordered by type : group blogs, individual researchers, teachers and educators, journalistic writers,… Read more »

• web

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In view or recents events & comments, some changes have been made or will be made shortly : categories : Sanitized the plethora of wordpress-categories to which posts belong. At the moment there are just 5 categories : ‘stories’ and ‘web’ (for all posts with low math-content) and three categories ‘level1’, ‘level2’ and ‘level3’, loosely… Read more »

• web

## Lists 2010 : MathOverflow bookmarks

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A few MathOverflow threads I bookmarked in 2010 for various reasons. Honest answer : Applications of algebraic geometry over a field with one element. James Borger’s answer : “I’m confident that the answer to the original question is no. There are hardly any theorems at all in the subject, much less ones with external applications!… Read more »

• noncommutative, web

## Jason & David, the Ninja warriors of noncommutative geometry

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SocialMention gives a rather accurate picture of the web-buzz on a specific topic. For this reason I check it irregularly to know what’s going on in noncommutative geometry, at least web-wise. Yesterday, I noticed two new kids on the block : Jason and David. Their blogs have (so far ) 44 resp. 27 posts, this… Read more »

• noncommutative, web

## Grothendieck’s folly

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Never a dull moment with Books Ngram Viewer. Pick your favorite topic(s) and try to explain and name valleys and peaks in the Ngram. An example. I wanted to compare the relative impact of a couple of topics I love, algebraic geometry (blue), category theory (red), representation theory (green) and noncommutative geometry (the bit of… Read more »

• web

## Books Ngram for your upcoming parties

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No christmas- or new-years family party without heated discussions. Often on quite silly topics. For example, which late 19th-century bookcharacter turned out to be most influential in the 20th century? Dracula, from the 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes who made his first appearance in 1887? Well,… Read more »

• noncommutative, number theory

## Langlands versus Connes

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This is a belated response to a Math-Overflow exchange between Thomas Riepe and Chandan Singh Dalawat asking for a possible connection between Connes’ noncommutative geometry approach to the Riemann hypothesis and the Langlands program. Here’s the punchline : a large chunk of the Connes-Marcolli book Noncommutative Geometry, Quantum Fields and Motives can be read as… Read more »

• absolute

## big Witt vectors for everyone (1/2)

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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… Read more »

• featured

## The odd knights of the round table

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Here’s a tiny problem illustrating our limited knowledge of finite fields : “Imagine an infinite queue of Knights ${ K_1,K_2,K_3,\ldots }$, waiting to be seated at the unit-circular table. The master of ceremony (that is, you) must give Knights $K_a$ and $K_b$ a place at an odd root of unity, say \$\omega_a… Read more »

• books, stories

## The artist and the mathematician

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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… Read more »

• geometry, math

## Grothendieck’s functor of points

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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… Read more »

• geometry, stories

## Grothendieck’s survival talks

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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,… Read more »

• web

## introducing : the n-geometry cafe

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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… Read more »

• stories

## Bourbakism & the queen bee syndrome

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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… Read more »

• web

## Now here’s an idea

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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… Read more »

• featured

## Pollock your own noncommutative space

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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… Read more »

• featured

## Views of noncommutative spaces

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The general public expects pictures from geometers, even from non-commutative geometers. Hence, it is important for researchers in this topic to make an attempt to convey the mental picture they have of their favourite noncommutative space, … somehow. Two examples : This picture was created by Shahn Majid. It appears on his visions of noncommutative… Read more »

• groups, stories

## The Scottish solids hoax

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A truly good math-story gets spread rather than scrutinized. And a good story it was : more than a millenium before Plato, the Neolithic Scottish Math Society classified the five regular solids : tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron. And, we had solid evidence to support this claim : the NSMS mass-produced stone replicas of… Read more »