Stirring a cup of coffee
Please allow for a couple of end-of-semester bluesy ramblings. I just finished grading the final test of the last of five courses I lectured this semester. Most of them went, I believe, rather well. As...
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The joys of running a WordPress blog
Earlier today, John Duncan (of moonshine fame) emailed he was unable to post a comment to the previous post: “I went to post a comment but somehow couldn’t convince the website to cooperate.” There’s...
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Brancusi’s advice : avoid vampires
My one and only resolution for 2018: ban vampires from my life! Here’s the story. In the 1920’s, Montparnasse was at the heart of the intellectual and artistic life in Paris because studios and cafés...
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Smullyan and the President’s sanity
Smullyan found himself in a very strange country indeed! All the inhabitants of this country are completely truthful – they always tell you honestly what they believe, but the trouble is that about...
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in praise of libraries
I’m back in Antwerp for over a week now, and finally got hold of our copy of Shimura’s “Introduction to the arithmetic theory of automorphic functions”. The sad story of disappearing libraries at our...
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We sit in our ivory towers and think
I’m on vacation, and re-reading two ‘metabiographies’: Philippe Douroux : Alexandre Grothendieck : Sur les traces du dernier génie des mathématiques and Siobhan Roberts : Genius At Play: The Curious...
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Teapot supremacy
No, this is not another timely post about the British Royal family. It’s about Richard Borcherds’ “teapot test” for quantum computers. A lot of money is being thrown at the quantum computing hype,...
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Grothendieck stuff
January 13th, Gallimard published Grothendieck’s text Recoltes et Semailles in a fancy box containing two books. Here’s a G-translation of Gallimard’s blurb: “Considered the mathematical genius of the...
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The hype cycle of an idea
These three ideas (re)surfaced over the last two decades, claiming to have potential applications to major open problems: (2000) $\mathbb{F}_1$-geometry tries to view $\mathbf{Spec}(\mathbb{Z})$ as a...
View ArticleAgainst toposes
The French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Levi-Strauss once observed “In Paris, intellectuals need a new toy every 15 years.” Some pointers to applications of their toy of choice for the past...
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