Author Archives: Persiflage

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 →

Posted in Mathematics | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

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 →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

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 →

Posted in Mathematics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

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 →

Posted in Politics | Tagged | 1 Comment

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 →

Posted in Mathematics | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

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 →

Posted in Uncategorized, Waffle | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Mathematics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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 →

Posted in Mathematics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Zeilberger + ChatGPT

Posted on June 1, 2024 by Persiflage

Since I don’t have maple, I can’t play with the following code: https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/tokhniot/MultiAlmkvistZeilberger.txt But is ChatGPT now good enough to re-write this in either pari/gp or magma (or Mathematica). I’m not sure how realistic this might be (without some serious … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Unramified Fontaine-Mazur for representations coming from abelian varieties

Posted on May 9, 2024 by Persiflage

Mark Kisin gave a talk at the number theory seminar last week where the following problem arose: Let \(W\) be the Galois representation associated to the Tate module of an abelian variety \(A\) over a number field, and suppose that … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics | Tagged , | 4 Comments