Author Archives: Persiflage

Serre 1: Calegari 0

Posted on October 18, 2016 by Persiflage

I just spent a week or so trying to determine whether Serre’s conjecture about the congruence subgroup property was false for a very specific class of S-arithmetic groups. The punch line, perhaps not surprisingly, was that I had made an … Continue reading →

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Champagne Marxists

Posted on October 15, 2016 by Persiflage

One wonders whether it is only the US in which highly educated white liberal college students from the upper reaches of the socio-economic strata support the extremely regressive Bernie Sanders-style policy of spending a trillion dollars on free education for … Continue reading →

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Sawada Coffee

Posted on August 23, 2016 by Persiflage

The Tip: I received a hot tip to visit Sawada Coffee, proclaimed (by a facebook friend of my source) as “the best coffee in Chicago.” Here is a review. First impressions: Somewhat of a skater-hipster vibe. It turned out that Sawada … Continue reading →

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fivethirtyeight.com doesn’t understand mathematics

Posted on June 2, 2016 by Persiflage

I happened to find myself browsing fivethirtyeight.com a few weeks ago, where I came across a column known as the “riddler.” The particular problem of the week (see here) was to answer the following: Problem: It’s Friday and that means … Continue reading →

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Prime divisors of polynomials

Posted on May 29, 2016 by Persiflage

A heuristic model from the last post suggests that the “expected” order of the Galois group associated to a weight one modular form of projective type \(A_5\) is infinite. And when one tries to solve the inverse Galois problem for … Continue reading →

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Central Extensions and Weight One Forms

Posted on May 23, 2016 by Persiflage

As mentioned in the comments to the last post, Kevin Buzzard and Alan Lauder have made an extensive computation of weight one modular forms in characteristic zero (see also here). Thinking about what that data might contain, I wondered about … Continue reading →

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LMFDB!?

Posted on May 12, 2016 by Persiflage

The LMFDB has gone live! I previously expressed on this blog a somewhat muted opinion about certain aspects of the website’s functionality, and it seems that my complaints have mainly been addressed in the latest version. On the other hand, … Continue reading →

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Report From Berkeley

Posted on April 22, 2016 by Persiflage

My recent trip to Berkeley did not result in a chance to test whether the Cheeseboard pizza maintained its ranking, but did give me the opportunity to attend the latest Bay Area Number Theory and Algebraic Geometry day, on a … Continue reading →

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Tensor Products

Posted on March 28, 2016 by Persiflage

Let \(W\) be an irreducible representation of a finite group \(G.\) Say that \(W\) is tensor indecomposable if any isomorphism \(W = U \otimes V\) implies that either \(U\) or \(V\) is a character. In conversations with Matt and Toby … Continue reading →

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Due Process

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Persiflage

When I was a senior (’93), my high school began a program of inviting “distinguished” visitors to give talks to a selected number of students, several of whom were also invited to lunch with the speaker. I was fortunate that … Continue reading →

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