Archive for August, 2009
Home from the UK. I like reading the British newspaper for the pleasure of encountering sentences that read, to my American ear, like something an American would write in an attempt to sound droll and British. Two from yesterday’s Evening Standard: “Olympia Haralambous, 16, scored 10 A* grades despite being hit in the head with [...]
Filed under: food, language, offhand | 9 Comments
Tags: britain, drollery, england, uk, vernacular
OK, this isn’t really an anabelian puzzle, but it was presented to me at the anabelian conference by Alexei Skorobogatov. Let X_n be the moduli space of n-tuples of points in A^2 such that no three are collinear. The comment section of this blog computed the number of components of X_n(R) back in January. Skorobogatov [...]
Filed under: math | 15 Comments
Tags: algebraic geometry, anabelian, cohomology, configuration space, finite fields, moduli spaces, number theory, skorobogatov
Suppose X is a scheme over a field K, and write Xbar for the basechange of X to Kbar, so that as usual we have an exact sequence. . Now there may be no section from G_K back to . But certainly X has a rational point over some finite extension L/K, which means that [...]
Filed under: math | 10 Comments
Tags: algebraic geometry, anabelian, number theory, section conjecture
(Note: this is being posted from an airport shortly before boarding, so this is less edited than usual. I have some more concrete remarks on the puzzle below but will save them for later.) Let X/K be a variety over a number field; then we have an exact sequence of etale fundamental groups and every [...]
Filed under: math | Leave a Comment
Tags: algebraic geometry, anabelian, birational section conjecture, curves, florian pop, jochen koenigsmann, number theory, section conjecture
Astonishing, logarithmic
Sometimes I wish people would stop saying “exponential” when they just mean “fast” or “a lot.” Be careful what you wish for. From Benjamin F. Carlson in the Atlantic: A Quantum Leap, marvels Simon Rogers at The Guardian in a post that graphs Bolt’s astonishing, logarithmic rise in speed.
Filed under: math, offhand | 6 Comments
Tags: logarithmic, pedantry, usain bolt
Anabelian puzzle 1: lifting Galois representations from symplectic groups to mapping class groups
This is an experimental post: I’m going to put up something I’ve thought about only vaguely and partially, with the idea that it might be an interesting thing to discuss with people at the upcoming workshop on anabelian geometry at the Newton Institute. Please forgive (or, better, correct) any and all mistakes. Here’s an old [...]
Filed under: math | Leave a Comment
Tags: algebraic geometry, anabelian, jacobian, mapping class group, symplectic
Smarts, luck, wealth
Reuters blogger Felix Salmon wrote Tuesday: A tweet from Joe Weisenthal yesterday, on the subject of Annie Leibovitz, is I think revealing of a particularly American mindset: call it the Wealth Corollary of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. In a nutshell, it says that if you’ve made lots of money, you must be pretty smart. Isn’t [...]
Filed under: economics, offhand | 3 Comments
Tags: efficient market hypothesis, emh, felix salmon, wealth
Paean
Macaroni and cheese can be found all over Wisconsin. Deep-fried macaroni and cheese is on the menu of at least one restaurant here in town. But for deep-fried macaroni and cheese on a stick, I think you have to go to the state fair. I love the state fair.
Filed under: food, offhand | 4 Comments
Tags: apotheosis, deep-fried, lipid panel, macaroni and cheese, state fair, stick, wisconsin, wisconsin state fair
At last there’s an acceptable, even pretty good, Chinese restaurant in downtown Madison: Fugu, in the space formerly occupied by the misleadingly named Yummy Buffet. (OK, to be fair, it was actually a buffet.) It’s billed as pan-Asian but the management is from Hong Kong, and I’ve done well by sticking to the Chinese portion [...]
Filed under: food, language, madison | 5 Comments
Tags: chinese, chinese food, chinese restaurants, dictionary, fugu, la wei, restaurants, sausage, si ji dou, string beans
Jim Borger makes the following interesting suggestion in comments to the “Do you follow the arXiv?” thread: What I think would be way better is if the MathSciNet sent out emails with abstracts of newly published papers. With some very basic filtering, based on which authors, subjects, key words, etc you like, they could probably [...]
Filed under: academia, computers, math | 7 Comments
Tags: algebraic geometry, arxiv, field with one element, f_1, jim borger, mathscinet, social networking, tagging, tags
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