Author Archives: Persiflage

It’s not a Lemma, it’s a Proposition!

Posted on December 14, 2024 by Persiflage

Congratulations to Ken for winning the the Steele prize. I first met Ken on the Hearst mining circle. It was September of 1997, during the time I was applying for graduate schools. I was visiting Danny on the way to … Continue reading →

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“Fields of definition”

Posted on December 7, 2024 by Persiflage

Can you help settle a disagreement? This is a debate about notation I am having with a colleague; I will try to present it without prejudice (and probably fail). Let \(G\) be a group, and let \(V\) be a finite … Continue reading →

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Giving a good mathematics talk

Posted on November 2, 2024 by Persiflage

Last week, Tadashi Tokieda came to Chicago to give a colloquium. If you have seen him speak, you will not be surprised to learn that it was absolutely delightful talk. I carried the talk around with me in my mind … Continue reading →

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The Arthurian Legend

Posted on October 18, 2024 by Persiflage

Some time back, Kevin Buzzard (friend of the blog!) gave a series of talks in which he criticized certain aspects of the mathematical culture when it came to accepting proof. In addition to obvious targets like the classification of finite … Continue reading →

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Walter Neumann

Posted on September 30, 2024 by Persiflage

I recently learnt the sad news that Walter Neumann just passed away. Although I don’t think I have seen him in person for over 25 years, Walter was a pretty significant influence in my mathematical life. Here are some of … Continue reading →

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Am I taking students?

Posted on September 27, 2024 by Persiflage

I receive many (many) unsolicited emails about the possibility of working with me at grad school. Some are clearly bulk emails sent no doubt to a large number of professors. Some are customized to include phrases like “I was really … Continue reading →

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Not quite what I meant

Posted on August 15, 2024 by Persiflage

Weibo Fu wrote an interesting paper on upper bounds for spaces of Bianchi modular forms, pushing previous results of Simon Marshall and Yongquan Hu to get more or less optimal results in the weight aspect. More generally, for any number … Continue reading →

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Persiflage, 2012-2024

Posted on July 23, 2024 by Persiflage

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 … Continue reading →

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SL_n versus GL_n

Posted on July 18, 2024 by Persiflage

I recently wrote a paper (with Toby Gee and George Boxer, see also here) on constructing regular algebraic automorphic representations \(\pi\) of (cohomological) weight zero and level one, and therefore also cuspidal cohomology classes in the cohomology of \(\mathrm{GL}_n(\mathbf{Z})\) for … Continue reading →

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A talk on my new work with Vesselin Dimitrov and Yunqing Tang on irrationality

Posted on June 16, 2024 by Persiflage

Here is a video of my talk from the recent 70th birthday conference of Peter Sarnak. During a talk one always forgets to say certain things, so I realized that my blog could be a good place to give some … Continue reading →

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