Archive for June, 2011
One feature of the Poonen-Rains heuristics that might seem strange at first is that the dimension of the Selmer group isn’t 0 almost all the time. This is by contrast with the Cohen-Lenstra heuristic, where the p-torsion in the class group is indeed trivial about 1-1/p of the time. Instead, the Poonen-Rains heuristics predict that [...]
Filed under: math | Leave a Comment
Tags: birch-swinnerton-dyer, bsd, cohen-lenstra, elliptic curves, parity, poonen-rains, quadratic forms, selmer groups, sha
I blogged about Dan’s book before I read it and said “it’s surely terrific.” Now I’ve read it, and it is! The book follows three families, each occupying its own complicated position on the boundary between black and white, from Revolutionary times to the early 20th century. Sharfstein pieces together a miraculously detailed picture of [...]
Filed under: books, friends, history | 3 Comments
Tags: dan sharfstein, race, the invisible line
Great baseball names sound just like bad band names! Quiz: which of these are baseball players and which are musical acts? Jumpy Garcia Death to Flying Things Luscious Jackson Todd Van Poppel Three-Finger Brown T-Bone Shelby Vida Blue
Filed under: baseball, lists, offhand | 3 Comments
Calasan Diner is an Indonesian fast-food place that opened last month at Old Sauk and High Point, just inside the Beltline (same shopping center as Alicia Ashman library.) Es alpukat is an Indonesian sweet drink made with avocado, instant coffee, and condensed milk. You can get the latter at the former and I was [...]
Filed under: food, madison | 1 Comment
Tags: avocado, calasan, es alpukat, fried chicken, indonesia, indonesian food, restaurants
At the AIM workshop on Cohen-Lenstra heuristics last week I got to hear Bjorn Poonen give a terrific talk about his recent work with Eric Rains about the distribution of mod p Selmer groups in a quadratic twist family of elliptic curves. Executive summary: if E is an elliptic curve, say in Weierstrass form y^2 [...]
Filed under: math | 8 Comments
Tags: algebraic geometry, cohen-lenstra, dejong, elliptic curves, elliptic surfaces, isotropic, number theory, poonen, quadratic, rains, random matrices, selmer groups
Statistics, Politics, and Policy
The Berkeley Electronic Press launches a new journal: The increasing amount and complexity of available data is constantly creating new challenges for statistical thinking in policy problems. While many academic statisticians tend to share among themselves their latest methods and models, less attention has been paid to the usefulness of those statistical methods and models [...]
Filed under: academia, bad statistics, politics, psychology | 1 Comment
Tags: journals, statistics
There are two events X and Y whose probability you’d like to estimate. So you ask a hundred trusted, reasonable people what they think. Half of them say that the probability of X and the probability of Y are both 90%, and the probability of both X and Y occurring is 81%. The other half [...]
Filed under: math, philosophy | 11 Comments
Tags: independence, probability, puzzles
Good seminar hack from Ravi: The theory is as follows. If you can get even three small things out of a talk, it is a successful talk. And if you can’t get even three small things out of a talk, it was not a successful experience. Note that the things you get out of a [...]
Filed under: academia, friends, math | 3 Comments
Tags: ravi vakil, seminars, talks
She thinks so, and to make the point has vetoed the first digit of a $150,000 appropriation, cutting the funding for the program to a third of the amount approved by the legislature. Steve B., knowing me to be a partial veto aficionado, wrote me to ask whether Gov. Martinez can actually do this. I [...]
Filed under: news, politics | 1 Comment
Tags: governor, law, new mexico, veto, wisconsin
Blogroll
-
Recent Comments
Richard Séguin on No good news for Wisconsin Dem… JSE on Long on Romney JSE on Long on Romney Matthew Kahle on Long on Romney Adam on Long on Romney
