Dinner at the Helmand: Zagat rating 27 (Food) and 20 (Service). After I was seated, it was fifteen minutes until I was brought a menu. Sixty seconds later, the waitress asked what I wanted to order, and then pouted when I said I needed a little extra time. References to the owner being a brother of Hamid Karzai were far less conspicuous then on my last visit. The bread is great!
Voltage coffee and art with Sug Woo Shin: pretentious in a hipster kind of way, elegant design, a payment system that involves an ipad, and a serious attitude towards coffee; in otherwords, my kind of place. I ordered a cortado, which was everything one could ask it to be. Who would have thought even five years ago that Kendall square would have a place like this!
Poonen can give a beautiful exposition of Coleman-Chabauty in 10 minutes. And he knows how to wield it too; see the recent beautiful result of Poonen-Stoll.
Seminars by Calegari & Calegari at MIT and Harvard. This off-broadway show will come to Chicago soon, book your tickets now!
Suppose that \(X\) is a PEL Shimura variety. Can one classify all \(X\) for which the image in \(A_g\) lands in the Torelli locus? In Rachel Pries’ talk at MIT, a result of Moonen was mentioned which classified the \(A/X\) which satisfied certain exceptional isomorphisms with families of Jacobians of curves which are cyclic covers of the projective line, but I wasn’t sure whether this was supposed to give the complete answer to this question.
Sitting next to me in Rachel’s talk: David Treumann, who has a nice paper with Venkatesh on the way (I’ll update the link when it becomes available.)
Unconfirmed Rumor: Mark Kisin’s student Thanos Papaïoannou will be the next president of Cyprus.
It was pretty funny to unexpectedly run into you in the Harvard common room at lunch . . .