Airport barbecue

28Nov09

You can never get good pizza in the airport, or deli, or burritos, or Chinese. But I just ate yet another satisfying airport meat-and-two-sides, this one at the Speedway Grill in Charlotte-Douglas, where we’re paused on our long way home from Thanksgiving. It was good enough that CJ, to my great surprise, demanded more than [...]

Filed under: food, travel   |  9 Comments
Tags: airport, barbecue, bbq

Local points on quadratic twists of X_0(N)

24Nov09

A new paper on the subject by my Ph.D. student, Ekin Ozman, is up on the arXiv today. The twists in question are isomorphic to X_0(N) over a quadratic field K = Q(sqrt(d)), but not over Q; the twist is via the Atkin-Lehner involution w_N, which is to say that the rational points on such [...]

Filed under: math   |  3 Comments
Tags: arithmetic geometry, elliptic curves, modular curves, number theory, ozman, q-curves, subliminal suggestion that you hire my excellent ph.d. student

well, did we, okay did we determine that Moebius maps were like isometries or whatever?

23Nov09

From the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, a 16,000 word transcript of an undergraduate math study session.  In case you ever wanted to know what it really sounds like when students work on our homework. S1: what if- what if A plus B, equals two times Y and C plus D equals two? [S3: [...]

Filed under: college, language, math, teaching   |  3 Comments
Tags: moebius, speech, transcripts, undergraduates

Cinnamon garlic eggs

21Nov09

CJ wanted scrambled eggs for lunch today.  While we were making them he said he thought they needed some spices.  But which ones?  He went over to the cabinet and picked out some cinnamon (“because that will make the eggs really sweet.”)  Then he dithered a bit between dried dill and garlic powder, but decided [...]

Filed under: cj, food, recipes   |  2 Comments
Tags: cinnamon, eggs, garlic, the next ferran adria

Mihailescu on the Leopoldt conjecture

21Nov09

You might have heard that Preda Mihailescu claimed a proof of Leopoldt’s conjecture earlier this year.  He just gave a series of lectures on the paper at Cambridge, and Minhyong Kim was there to blog about it.  Mihailescu has provided an “executive summary” of the argument.

Filed under: math   |  1 Comment
Tags: conjectures, iwasawa theory, leopoldt, mihailescu, number theory

Things I now know how to do: signal apology from inside a car

20Nov09

I mentioned a couple of months ago I didn’t know how to convey the sentiment “I’m sorry” while driving.  Why didn’t I think of this? (via MetaFilter.)

Filed under: cars   |  3 Comments
Tags: apologies, awesomeness, inventions, sorry

Disks in a box, update

18Nov09

In April, I blogged about the space of small disks in a box.  One question I mentioned there was the following:  if C(n,r) is the space of configurations of n non-overlapping disks of radius r in a box of sidelength 1, what kind of upper bounds on r assure that C(n,r) is connected?  A recent [...]

Filed under: math   |  3 Comments
Tags: combinatorial geometry, configuration space, fundamental groups, geometry

What to do in talks

16Nov09

Jason Starr, in comments, makes the excellent point that listing good things to do in talks helps society more than listing bad things.  Here’s his list: Tell a joke. Answer good questions from the audience. Give a simple example before giving a difficult one. Explain some history. Explain why some famous problem is hard. Break [...]

Filed under: math   |  12 Comments
Tags: advice, talks

What not to do in talks

14Nov09

Fearing Tavern‘s comment on the previous post links to his exhaustive list of “things not to do in a conference talk”: use cliche’ expressions include unecessary equations read paragraphs from slides animate unecessarily (vis-a-vis powerpoint) lie get caught lying read formula’s out loud ignore your time requirement cry (or sound as though you will) assume [...]

Filed under: math, offhand   |  13 Comments
Tags: advice, talks

In which Athens, GA is great

13Nov09

Blogging from the airport shuttle on my way from Athens to ATL. “Radio Free Europe” on the radio, on a station whose bumpers bill it as “the college football voice of the south.” Things I liked about Athens: Grits at Five Star Cafe. Steak and gravy (roughly equivalent to chicken fried steak) at Weaver D’s [...]

Filed under: food, music, travel   |  5 Comments
Tags: athens, cheesecake, georgia, r.e.m., twin tigers