Archive for February, 2011
Followup on my earlier claim to have been categorified. The Cohen-Lenstra conjectures govern the p-adic variation of class numbers of quadratic imaginary fields. At first glance they look very strange. If you ask the conjectures what proportion of quadratic imaginary class numbers are indivisible by 3, you don’t get 2/3, as you might expect if [...]
Filed under: math | Leave a Comment
Tags: categorification, cohen-lenstra
Active clustering
Just a note — the paper “Active Clustering: Robust and Efficient Hierarchical Clustering using Adaptively Selected Similarities,” by Eriksson, Dasarathy, Singh, and Nowak, describing the algorithm which I (but not they) refer to as “compressed clustering,” is now on the arXiv.
Filed under: math | Leave a Comment
Tags: clustering, compressed sensing, computer science, data
Admired sentences
Somebody out there liked my book. In fact, she singles out for praise a single sentence. And the sad truth is: I have no memory of having written this sentence. I guess I’d imagined her favorite sentence would be something I, too, would have singled out in my mind. But no. Anyway, here it is: [...]
Filed under: books, the grasshopper king, writing | 2 Comments
Tags: michael chabon, mysteries of pittsburgh, richard brautigan, sentences, trout fishing in america
Here’s Tierney in the New York Times: Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very [...]
Filed under: academia, math, news | 4 Comments
Tags: john tierney, sex differences, women in science
My friend and former It’s Academic teammate Dan Sharfstein has a new book out, The Invisible Line. I haven’t read it but it’s surely terrific. Not to mention well-blurbed: “The Invisible Line offers a trilogy of remarkable tales brimming with risk taking, camouflage, irony, narrow escapes, misgivings, regret, delight, and full-scale human drama. Excellent histories [...]
Filed under: books, friends, history | 2 Comments
Tags: daniel sharfstein, race, the invisible line
The CAIRO projection system has the Orioles winning an average of 77 games this year; that’s 11 games better than their 2010 record (biggest projected jump in the majors) and 7 over the 2011 projection for the team as constituted prior the winter meetings, also baseball’s best figure. I don’t think the Orioles are 11 [...]
Filed under: baseball, orioles | 3 Comments
Tags: CAIRO, tony batista, unwarranted optimism
I had the good luck to be in New York on Friday when David Kazhdan gave an unscheduled lecture at NYU about categorification and representations of finite groups. For people like me, who spend most of our days dismally uncategorified, the talk was a beautiful advertisement for categorification. Actually, the first twenty minutes of the [...]
Filed under: math, travel | 11 Comments
Tags: categories, categorification, drinfeld center, hecke algebras, kazhdan, representation theory, sheaves
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