# Tag:representations

• ## Penrose tilings and noncommutative geometry

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, […]

• ## what have quivers done to students?

A few years ago a student entered my office asking suggestions for his master thesis. “I’m open to any topic as long as it has nothing to do with those silly quivers!” At that time not the best of opening-lines to address me and, inevitably, the most disastrous teacher-student-conversation-ever followed (also on my part, i’m…

• ## Seating the first few thousand Knights

The Knight-seating problems asks for a consistent placing of n-th Knight at an odd root of unity, compatible with the two different realizations of the algebraic closure of the field with two elements.

• ## Pollock your own noncommutative space

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…

• ## Conway’s big picture

Conway and Norton showed that there are exactly 171 moonshine functions and associated two arithmetic subgroups to them. We want a tool to describe these and here’s where Conway’s big picture comes in very handy. All moonshine groups are arithmetic groups, that is, they are commensurable with the modular group. Conway’s idea is to view…

• ## the monster graph and McKay’s observation

While the verdict on a neolithic Scottish icosahedron is still open, let us recall Kostant’s group-theoretic construction of the icosahedron from its rotation-symmetry group $A_5$. The alternating group $A_5$ has two conjugacy classes of order 5 elements, both consisting of exactly 12 elements. Fix one of these conjugacy classes, say $C$ and…

• ## noncommutative F_un geometry (2)

We use Kontsevich’s idea of thin varieties to define complexified varieties over F\_un.

• ## noncommutative F_un geometry (1)

We propose to extend the Connes-Consani definition to noncommuntative F_un varieties.

• ## what does the monster see?

The Monster is the largest of the 26 sporadic simple groups and has order 808 017 424 794 512 875 886 459 904 961 710 757 005 754 368 000 000 000 = 2^46 3^20 5^9 7^6 11^2 13^3 17 19 23 29 31 41 47 59 71. It is not so much the size…

• ## Klein’s dessins d’enfant and the buckyball

We saw that the icosahedron can be constructed from the alternating group $A_5$ by considering the elements of a conjugacy class of order 5 elements as the vertices and edges between two vertices if their product is still in the conjugacy class. This description is so nice that one would like to have a…