Author Archives: Persiflage

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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Ventotene, Part II

Posted on March 17, 2016 by Persiflage

I promised to return to a more mathematical summary of the conference in Ventotene, and indeed I shall do so in the next two posts. One of the themes of the conference was bounding the order of the torsion subgroup … Continue reading →

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Best seat in the house

Posted on March 6, 2016 by Persiflage

I recently attended an András Schiff recital at Chicago Symphony Center (not the first such Schiff performance I have been to). The conceit of this concert was the “last sonatas,” a performance of the last sonatas of Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, … Continue reading →

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Hilbert Modular Forms of Partial Weight One, Part III

Posted on October 17, 2015 by Persiflage

My student Richard Moy is graduating! Richard’s work has already appeared on this blog before, where we discussed his joint work with Joel Specter showing that there existed non-CM Hilbert modular forms of partial weight one. Today I want to … Continue reading →

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