Persiflage, 2012-2024

No, not a eulogy!

I’ve been a bit concerned for a while about how stable wordpress is as a website — various plugins are always updating on their own, and I have sometimes noticed that old blog posts do not always render latex correctly (at some point there was a change in how latex was handled). For a while I thought I should do something to make sure that all my past math posts did not suddenly disappear. This feeling was hastened when the subversion platform I was using, xp-dev, suddenly went down when the owner (and apparently only employee) died and all the older versions of my collaborative projects become permanently unavailable.

Fortunately it is not too hard to download all old posts, and it remained to clean up the html and convert it until a latex document. That has now been done! Now you can read everything all at once at this link, which I plan to keep on my webpage (and perhaps even on the arXiv). Since I wasn’t so keen on editing a 300+ page pdf, it is only lightly modified, so many of the mistakes in the original posts (not corrected by commenters) will remain. I’ve left the posts more or less unchanged except for making some latex improvements, and I’ve included a selection of the comments when they were particularly relevant. I plan to update this file every now and then as I continue writing more blog posts. I’ve added (incomplete) notes on posts when I was aware of some particularly notable update since the post was written, and I tried (in a very incomplete way) to add references to papers I simply mentioned, but it could certainly do (at the very least) with some copy editing. I’m not sure anyone will look at these old posts besides me, but I am happy to have them in a more stable form and also easier to search.

Please feel free to point out any errors (big or small) in the pdf file on this post!