Outback Steakhouse with the alphabetical epicures

31Jul09

CJ and I joined the Eating in Madison A to Z crew again last month on a trip to the Outback Steakhouse, capping off a Father’s Day afternoon spent at Vitense Golfland.  Three and a half is too young for miniature golf, it turns out, but just right for Outback Steakhouse.

Filed under: blog, cj, food, madison   |  4 Comments
Tags: father's day, outback, outback steakhouse

Someone still loves you Meredith Salenger

29Jul09

Meredith Salenger went to college with me.  This was before Natalie Portman and the guy from Weezer came to town, and Meredith, who starred in The Journey of Natty Gann as a kid and moved up to leading young lady in a couple of teen movies, was as big a star as we had.  She [...]

Filed under: harvard, movies   |  4 Comments
Tags: brush with fame, clubby, green bay, meredith salenger, salenger

“Deforming Galois Representations” is online, too

27Jul09

The hits just keep on coming, as Barry Mazur has now posted a scan of his paper, “Deforming Galois Representations,” from the long-unavailable Galois Groups over Q proceedings, on his homepage.  I didn’t link directly to the .pdf because there’s tons of other interesting stuff on Barry’s homepage to look at!

Filed under: math   |  1 Comment
Tags: algebraic geometry, barry mazur, deformation theory, Galois representations, mazur, number theory

Netflix Prize photo finish!

26Jul09

Two hours less than 30 days ago, the team of BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos submitted the first entry to the Netflix Prize to exhibit a 10% improvement in performance over Netflix’s movie-recommendation algorithm.   That started the final clock for the competition — whoever’s ahead at 2:42 Eastern time today wins the $1 million prize. One [...]

Filed under: commerce, computers, math, news   |  5 Comments
Tags: ai, artificial intelligence, collaborative filtering, netflix, netflix prize, recommender systems

“Le Groupe Fondamental de la Droite Projective Moins Trois Points” is now online

24Jul09

The three papers that influenced me the most at the beginning of my mathematical career were “Rational Isogenies of Prime Degree,” by my advisor, Barry Mazur; Serre’s “Sur les représentations modulaires de degré 2 de ;” and Deligne’s 200-page monograph on the fundamental group of the projective line minus three points.  The year after I [...]

Filed under: books, math   |  9 Comments
Tags: algebraic geometry, curves, deligne, etale, fundamental group, grothendieck, motives, nilpotent, non-abelian, number theory, pierre deligne

Efficient markets and the digits of pi

23Jul09

John Quiggin had a good post yesterday on Crooked Timber about the various flavors of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which according to Quiggin is a piece of shuffling zombie social science that won’t die no matter how many flaming sticks you jam through its skull. The weakest form of the EMH is the so-called “random [...]

Filed under: economics, math, offhand   |  4 Comments
Tags: crooked timber, efficient markets hypothesis, emh, investing, pi, random walk, stock market

Reader survey: do you follow the arXiv?

19Jul09

For about a year now I’ve been following the math.AG and math.NT postings to the arXiv through Google Reader.  The good side of this is that you find out very quickly about papers in areas of special interest to you.  The downside, I guess, is that it can be sort of distracting; you sit down [...]

Filed under: math   |  21 Comments
Tags: arxiv, reader survey

White Sox 12, Orioles 8

17Jul09

I like Jim Thome a lot, and in the abstract I am happy to have had the chance to see him hit a 450 foot home run, but in practice I’d prefer it not to have been against the Orioles with the bases loaded. In keeping with the general tenor of the season, this was [...]

Filed under: baseball, orioles   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: jim thome, kam mickolio, white sox

One Paragraph of The Dwarf

16Jul09

Twice in my life I have read novels by unknown-to-me Nordic authors simply because they won the Nobel Prize, and in both cases they were really, really great.  The first was Independent People, by Halldór Laxness.  The second, which I’ve just finished, was Pär Lagerkvist’s short novel The Dwarf, in Alexandra Dick’s translation.  Looks like [...]

Filed under: books, children, psychology, writing   |  4 Comments
Tags: dwarf, dwarves, lagerkvist, nobel prize, one paragraph, psychoanalysis

Madison Science Pub at Brocach, July 26

14Jul09

A couple of weeks ago at the farmer’s market I ran into some undergrads who were doing science demonstrations on Capitol Square.  I tried to get CJ to drop the ball into the beaker and displace some liquid, but he was too shy.  While I was there, another guy wandered by to see what was [...]

Filed under: food, madison, teaching   |  4 Comments
Tags: anthropology, brocach, corned beef hash, popular science, science pub