Author Archives: Persiflage

En Passant IV

Posted on July 19, 2014 by Persiflage

My students Richard Moy and Joel Specter have uploaded their paper on partial weight one Hilbert modular forms, previously discussed here, to the ArXiv. Germany now leads the world in both soccer and perfectoid spaces. This is a recipe for … Continue reading →

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A public service announcement concerning Fontaine-Mazur for GL(1)

Posted on July 12, 2014 by Persiflage

There’s a rumour going around that results from transcendence theory are required to prove the Fontaine-Mazur conjecture for \(\mathrm{GL}(1)\). This is not correct. In Serre’s book on \(\ell\)-adic representations, he defines a \(p\)-adic representation \(V\) of a global Galois group … Continue reading →

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Report from Luminy

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Persiflage

For how long has Luminy been infested with bloodthirsty mosquitoes? The combination of mosquitoes in my room with the fact that my bed was 6′ long with a completely unnecessary headboard (which meant that I had to sleep on an … Continue reading →

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An Obvious Claim

Posted on July 6, 2014 by Persiflage

It’s been a while since I saw Serre’s “how to write mathematics badly” lecture, but I’m pretty sure there would have been something about the dangers of using the word “obvious.” After all, if something really is obvious, then it … Continue reading →

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Huuuuuge piles of cash

Posted on June 23, 2014 by Persiflage

As widely reported today, the first of the “Breakthrough” prizes in mathematics have been announced. Leaving aside the question as to whether such awards are sensible (Persiflage is more sympathetic to capitalist principles than your average pinko marxist mathematician), I … Continue reading →

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There are non-liftable weight one forms modulo p for any p

Posted on June 10, 2014 by Persiflage

Let \(p\) be any prime. In this post, we show that there is an integer \(N\) prime to \(p\) such that \(H^1(X_1(N),\omega_{\mathbf{Z}})\) has a torsion class of order \(p\). Almost equivalently, there exists a Katz modular form of level \(N\) … Continue reading →

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Math and Genius

Posted on June 6, 2014 by Persiflage

Jordan Ellenberg makes a compelling case, as usual, on the pernicious cultural notion of “genius.” Jordan’s article also brought to mind a thought provoking piece on genius by Moon Duchin here (full disclosure: the link on Duchin’s website has the … Continue reading →

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I don’t know how to prove Serre’s conjecture.

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Persiflage

I find it slightly annoying that I don’t know how to prove Serre’s conjecture for imaginary quadratic fields. In particular, I don’t even see any particularly good strategy for showing that a surjective Galois representation — say finite flat with … Continue reading →

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Thurston, Selberg, and Random Polynomials, Part II.

Posted on May 24, 2014 by Persiflage

What is the probability that the largest root of a polynomial is real? Naturally enough, this depends on how one models a random polynomial. If we take polynomials of degree N which are constrained to have all of their roots … Continue reading →

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Thurston, Selberg, and Random Polynomials, Part I.

Posted on May 21, 2014 by Persiflage

Apart from everything else, you could always count on Bill Thurston to ask interesting questions. This is the first of a small number of posts which were motivated in part by figure two from this paper, and this accompanying MO … Continue reading →

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