Archive for January, 2009
I was writing down some mathematical notes and encountered a grammatical intuition that confused me. “X, which is the bound given in (1.2), and which is sharp” sounds fine; “X, which is the bound given in (1.2), and is sharp” sounds weird; “X, which is the bound given in (1.2), and sharp” sounds awful. I [...]
Filed under: language, offhand | 6 Comments
Tags: grammar, parallelism, philip larkin
Elizabeth Alexander’s decision to deliver the inaugural poem in “poetry reading voice,” with careful little pauses to indicate line breaks, was a bad mistake — after Obama’s smooth, long lines, she sounded like Rain Man, or a William Shatner impersonator, or Rain Man impersonating William Shatner. But I thought the poem itself, “Praise Song For [...]
Filed under: friends, news, poetry, politics | 4 Comments
Tags: adam kirsch, bureaucracy, elizabeth alexander, inauguration, monica youn, praise song for the day, stephen burt, william shatner
A paper by Yuhan Zha, posted on the arXiv yesterday under the unassuming title “A height inequality,” claims to prove the ABC conjecture via a notion of “quasi-arithmetic differential,” some kind of Arakelov-theoretic gadget which apparently allows you to mimic complex differential geometry well enough to imitate the proof of the function field case. Zha [...]
Filed under: math | 14 Comments
Tags: abc, abc conjecture, arakelov, arakelov theory, number theory, yuhan zha
Bilu-Parent update
The result of Yuri Bilu and Pierre Parent that I blogged about last summer has appeared in a new, modified version on the arXiv. The authors discovered a mistake in the earlier version — their theorem on rational points on X^split(p) is now conditional on GRH, while they get an unconditional version for points on [...]
Filed under: math | 2 Comments
Tags: algebraic geometry, Bilu, elliptic curves, Galois representations, modular curves, number theory, Parent, serre
That’s a proposal that appeared today on Citizen’s Briefing Book, the digg-style section of the Obama transition website where interested citizens can post, and vote on, suggestions for the new administration. On first glance, this sounds good to me! Currently, the NSF has a successful graduate fellowship program, which each year awards a few dozen [...]
Filed under: academia, economics, education, math | 11 Comments
Tags: fellowships, graduate school, grants, NSF, Ph.D.
TIGER!
Wouldn’t it be good PR for the Henry Vilas Zoo to indicate on their website that a huge awesome tiger lives there now? I wouldn’t have known about it if my eye hadn’t fallen on a small sidebar in a discarded Wisconsin State Journal. But once I found out, I hustled CJ over there immediately. [...]
Filed under: cj, madison, news | 2 Comments
Tags: amur tiger, elephant, giraffe, ocd, tiger, vilas, vilas zoo, zoo
Well? Why? Osteria Papavero is a relatively new downtown Italian. Small friendly room, small reliable menu. A ladder with some vines slung over it gives the place a rustic feel, and at the moment there’s an agreeably modest Christmas tree in the corner. The other night, Mrs. Q and I started with ribolitta (not on [...]
Filed under: food, madison | 5 Comments
Tags: celiac, italian, osteria papavero, papavero, restaurants, ubriaco
“Orphans” are things you meant to think about but which you’ve regretfully concluded are never going to rise to the top of the stack. Ideas you never finished having. Blogging your orphans seems a good use of a math blog, or even a partial math blog like this one — at best, someone else will [...]
Filed under: math, politics, slate | 11 Comments
Tags: blogging my orphans, combinatorial geometry, combinatorics, configuration space, orphans, poole, rosenthal
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