Author Archives: Persiflage

Abandonware

Posted on December 25, 2017 by Persiflage

For a young mathematician, there is a lot of pressure to publish (or perish). The role of for-profit academic publishing is to publish large amounts of crappy mathematics papers, make a lot of money, but at least in return grant … Continue reading →

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

The ABC conjecture has (still) not been proved

Posted on December 17, 2017 by Persiflage

The ABC conjecture has (still) not been proved. Five years ago, Cathy O’Neil laid out a perfectly cogent case for why the (at that point recent) claims by Shinichi Mochizuki should not (yet) be regarded as constituting a proof of … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Politics, Rant | Tagged , , | 34 Comments

Graduation Day

Posted on November 26, 2017 by Persiflage

This last summer, I undertook my last official activity as a faculty member at Northwestern University, namely, graduation day! (I had a 0% courtesy appointment for two years until my last Northwestern students graduated.) Here I am with four of … Continue reading →

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

Abelian Surfaces are Potentially Modular

Posted on November 11, 2017 by Persiflage

Today I wanted (in the spirit of this post) to report on some new work in progress with George Boxer, Toby Gee, and Vincent Pilloni. Edit: The paper is now available here. Recal that, for a smooth projective variety X … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Jobs Related Public Service Announcements

Posted on November 4, 2017 by Persiflage

Job season is upon us. Now is probably a good time to give applicants (and letter writers!) a few pointers. Of course, there are many other sources of advice on this topic, so let me try to narrow the focus … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Schaefer and Stubley on Class Groups

Posted on October 28, 2017 by Persiflage

I talked previously about work of Wake and Wang-Erickson on deformations of Eisenstein residual representations. In that post, I also mentioned a paper of Emmanuel Lecouturier who has also proved some very interesting theorems. Today, I wanted to talk about … Continue reading →

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

J’accuse!

Posted on October 21, 2017 by Persiflage

I found the following documentary remarkable and quite interesting. Without offering here any opinion on its merits, I certainly give it credit for taking an unpopular position and sticking with it. This blog is no stranger to challenging perceived wisdom, … Continue reading →

Posted in Music | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Mathieu Magic

Posted on October 16, 2017 by Persiflage

I previously mentioned that I once made (in a footnote) the false claim that for a 11-dimensional representation V of the Mathieu group M_12, the 120 dimensional representation Ad^0(V) was irreducible. I had wanted to write down representations W of … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Commuting

Posted on October 8, 2017 by Persiflage

I found out a good way to describe how long my commute is: about three minutes more than the length of the second movement of Beethoven’s 9th (the greatest movement!) On the other hand, that measure proved inaccurate the very … Continue reading →

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Swimming Leaderboard

Posted on September 29, 2017 by Persiflage

The first rule of number theory swim club is…talk about number theory swim club! Anyone can join, as long as you are a number theorist at the University of Chicago with a current gym membership. The standard meeting time is … Continue reading →

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