Archive for December, 2009
One of the appetizers at Osteria Papavero is “antipasti di tartufo” — three dishes with black truffle, subject to chef’s whim and different every night. Truffle is one of those ingredients that I know is distinguished and I know is expensive but which has never really revealed its charms to me. Papavero is helping me [...]
Filed under: comedy, food, madison, magazines | Leave a Comment
Tags: cartoons, fusilli, lamb, new yorker, osteria papavero, restaurants, sausage, truffle
In which I improve on Sting
The worst lyric Sting ever wrote, obviously, was It’s no use, he sees her, he starts to shake and cough Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov But if he’d changed the last line to Just like the robot in that book by Asimov it would have been the best lyric he [...]
Filed under: books, music, offhand | 3 Comments
Tags: asimov, lyrics, sting, the police
Early in the just-released Up in the Air, George Clooney’s character reveals to a young coworker his dream of registering 10 million frequent flyer miles on American Airlines. She responds dismissively, “Isn’t 10 million just a number?” Clooney replies — with just the right weary exasperation — “Pi is just a number.” It’s a good [...]
Filed under: math, movies, offhand | 6 Comments
Tags: george clooney, up in the air
Lately I’ve been thinking again about the “square pegs” problem: proving that any simple closed plane curve has an inscribed square. (I’ve blogged about this before: here, here, here, here, here.) This post is just to collect some recent links that are relevant to the problem, some of which contain new results. Jason Cantarella has [...]
Filed under: math | 1 Comment
Tags: geometry, inscribed squares, squares, topology
Madison pizza round-up
The alphabetical gourmands of Eating in Madison A to Z are up to “Pizza ____.” I recently tagged along on their visit to Pizza Oven on the West Side: the resulting review just went up on their blog. Seems a good time to set down some of my own thoughts on Madison pizza. Ian’s: Pizza [...]
Filed under: food, madison | 2 Comments
Tags: casa bianca, glass nickel, ian's, ian's pizza, italian, macedonia, pizza, pizza brutta
Menopause Matters
It’s a little outside the usual stomping grounds of this blog, but I thought I’d mention that my cousin-in-law the doctor, Julia Edelman, has a new book out, Menopause Matters. Julia is the mom of this cousin-in-law, by the way.
Filed under: books, family | 1 Comment
Tags: health, menopause
RIP Miles “Teddywedger” Allen
Miles Allen, founder and proprietor of Myles Teddywedger at the top of State Street, died Friday of cancer. No word yet on whether the Cornish pasty emporium will keep operating. If not, it’s a real loss — no one else on Capitol Square really rivaled MT for a cheap, satisfying, almost instant meal.
Filed under: food, madison, news | Leave a Comment
Tags: cornish pastry, death, miles teddywedger, rip
Five prints from Evan Baden‘s photo series The Illuminati are hanging now through January 19 in the 2nd floor galleries at the Wisconsin Union. The idea is pretty simple: photos of young people by the light of their computing devices. But they’re beautiful. Whoever curates photography at the Union is doing a very good job.
Filed under: computers, madison | Leave a Comment
Tags: art, evan baden, photography, union, uw, wisconsin
The Year in Mathematical Ideas
I have a short piece about Tim Gowers’ Polymath project in the 2009 edition of the New York Times Year in Ideas feature. In January, Timothy Gowers, a professor of mathematics at Cambridge and a holder of the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor, decided to see if the comment section of his blog could prove [...]
Filed under: math, writing | 3 Comments
Tags: 538, gessen, gowers, john allen paulos, new york times, perelman, polls, polymath, zombies
Homological stability for Hurwitz spaces and the Cohen-Lenstra conjecture over function fields
Now I’ll say a little bit about the actual problem treated by the new paper with Venkatesh and Westerland. It’s very satisfying to have an actual theorem of this kind: for years now we’ve been going around saying “it seems like asymptotic conjectures in analytic number theory should have a geometric reflection as theorems about [...]
Filed under: math, papers | Leave a Comment
Tags: akshay venkatesh, algebraic geometry, analytic number theory, cohen-lenstra, craig westerland, function fields, hurwitz spaces, number theory, topology
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