Monthly Archives: May 2014

I don’t know how to prove Serre’s conjecture.

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Persiflage

I find it slightly annoying that I don’t know how to prove Serre’s conjecture for imaginary quadratic fields. In particular, I don’t even see any particularly good strategy for showing that a surjective Galois representation — say finite flat with … Continue reading →

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Thurston, Selberg, and Random Polynomials, Part II.

Posted on May 24, 2014 by Persiflage

What is the probability that the largest root of a polynomial is real? Naturally enough, this depends on how one models a random polynomial. If we take polynomials of degree N which are constrained to have all of their roots … Continue reading →

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Thurston, Selberg, and Random Polynomials, Part I.

Posted on May 21, 2014 by Persiflage

Apart from everything else, you could always count on Bill Thurston to ask interesting questions. This is the first of a small number of posts which were motivated in part by figure two from this paper, and this accompanying MO … Continue reading →

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A postview of Bellairs/Barbados

Posted on May 14, 2014 by Persiflage

I am just recovering from my trip to Barbados for the McGill sponsored conference at the Bellairs institute (which I previously discussed here). I thought it was a wonderfully enjoyable conference, for many reasons. The first is that I got … Continue reading →

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Are business schools intellectually bankrupt?

Posted on May 11, 2014 by Persiflage

From the New York Times today, a report from business school professors concerning a study which claims to show that professors are prejudiced, too. I remember reading the original paper on this study, which made it painfully clear that the … Continue reading →

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