Archive for April, 2009
I had no idea, until somebody told me at lunch yesterday, that Pierre Deligne had been granted a viscounty by the Queen of Belgium; and that, as part of his ennoblement, he had to devise for himself a coat of arms. And here it is: Why three chickens? Read here.
Filed under: math, offhand | 7 Comments
Tags: belgium, coat of arms, heraldry, nobility, pierre deligne, viscount
Max Lieblich gave a great talk at WAGS yesterday about something that looks like a counterexample to the Hasse principle, but secretly isn’t! All mistakes in this summary are my own. For a more authoritative take on the material below, see Max’s recent arXiv preprint. The counterexample Max countered is the central simple algebra A [...]
Filed under: math | 4 Comments
Tags: algebraic geometry, cohomology, hasse principle, max lieblich, number theory, rational points, talks
Don Henley Must Drive
We were driving back from Milwaukee Airport the other day and got stuck for a while behind an old Civic with a license plate reading DON HNLY. It puzzled me. Are there really people, in 2009, whose commitment to Don Henley is so strong as to demand a personalized license plate? EAGLES, all right, I [...]
Filed under: cars, music, offhand, travel | 1 Comment
Tags: don henley, eagles, license plate, mentors, wisconsin
Tuesday, April 21 — tomorrow! — brings the third lecture in the MALBEC series: Michael Coen, of computer sciences and biostat, talks on “Toward Formalizing “Abstract Nonsense”,” in Computer Sciences 1221 at 4pm. Here’s the abstract: The idea of a category — a set of objects sharing common properties – is a fundamental concept in [...]
Filed under: computers, madison, math | 1 Comment
Tags: ai, artificial intelligence, categories, machine learning, malbec, michael coen, partha niyogi, statistics, talks
Turn ahead the clock
Despite the dispiriting sweep we just endured at the hands of the Red Sox, the Orioles are for the first time in recent memory a team whose future seems kind of interesting — so it’s an opportune time for Tom’s reminiscence, via Joe Posnanski, of the Orioles’ last Turn Ahead The Clock Day. At the [...]
Filed under: baseball, orioles | Leave a Comment
Tags: albert belle, future, tom scocca
Gehry/Serra
Back from a very brief trip to Princeton. The much-maligned new science library, built by Frank Gehry, is now up. I like it — it’s very much like the Stata Center, but more humble. Here’s a small piece of it viewed from inside the Richard Serra sculpture “Fox and Hedgehog,” also much-maligned, and which I [...]
Filed under: architecture, travel | Leave a Comment
Tags: gehry, iphone, princeton, serra
In my previous post about the configuration space of hard discs in a box, I neglected to say anything about the main point of Persi’s article! It’s the following — even though you don’t know anything about the topology of the space of configurations, you can still do an excellent job of drawing a configuration [...]
Filed under: math | 1 Comment
Tags: diaconis, ghrist, monte carlo, statistics, topology
I took CJ to the terrific UW Science Expeditions last weekend — he had a great time, petting the stuffed badger, looking through a microscope for the first time, filling (and almost breaking) a pipette, and holding a caterpillar provided by the Department of Entomology. He declined, as did I, the opportunity to handle a [...]
Filed under: cj, music | 2 Comments
Tags: antigo silt loam, science, soil, wisconsin
In which my friends write things
We’re already on to the next Jewish holiday, but Jay Michaelson’s piece on the financial crisis as Purimspiel is still well worth reading. Opening Day has come at last, and the Orioles rang it in by drubbing the Yankees 10-5, in a weird-all-over kind of game. I can’t describe it better than Tom does. Alison [...]
Filed under: books, cj, friends, lists, orioles, psychology | Leave a Comment
Tags: alison buckholtz, cary chugh, charlie buckholtz, discipline, jay michaelson, parenting, purim, tom scocca
I’m sorry to say that I only made it to one movie at the Wisconsin Film Festival this year. But I picked a good one. I went to see Kevin Rafferty’s Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, a documentary about the most thrilling Harvard-Yale game ever played between two of the best teams Harvard and Yale ever [...]
Filed under: college, education, harvard, madison, movies | 2 Comments
Tags: cranky, football, grade inflation, kevin rafferty, princeton, yale
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