Author Archives: Persiflage

Ramanujan Machine Redux

Posted on February 11, 2021 by Persiflage

I had no intention to discuss the Ramanujan Machine again, but over the past few days there has been a flurry of (attempted) trollish comments on that post, so after taking a brief look at the latest version, I thought … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Rant | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Hire my students!

Posted on November 18, 2020 by Persiflage

I have three students graduating this year: Shiva Chidambaram, Eric Stubley, and Noah Taylor. In light of the last post, I should give them a boost by reminding you of their (numerous) results which have been discussed on this blog. … Continue reading →

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The upcoming jobs bloodbath

Posted on November 12, 2020 by Persiflage

Universities are losing lots of money this year. Even those schools with a sizeable endowment are very restricted in how those funds can be used, and the result is that many places will have hiring freezes. This is surely going … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

En Passant IX (I’m a Gnu)

Posted on October 28, 2020 by Persiflage

One feature of having an electric piano is the ability to record the accompaniment to songs which (for reasons of timing or otherwise) are quite hard to play and sing at the same time. A possible downside, however, is that … Continue reading →

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The eigencurve is (still) proper

Posted on October 23, 2020 by Persiflage

Although I don’t think about it so much anymore, the eigencurve of Coleman-Mazur was certainly one of my first loves. I can’t quite say I learnt about \(p\)-adic modular forms at my mother’s knee, but I did spend a formative … Continue reading →

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Chidambaram on Galois representations (not) associated to abelian varieties over Q

Posted on October 13, 2020 by Persiflage

Today’s post is about a new paper by my student Shiva. Suppose that \(A/\mathbf{Q}\) is a principally polarized abelian variety of dimension \(g\) and \(p\) is a prime. The Galois representation on the \(p\)-torsion points \(A[p]\) gives rise to a … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Students, Work of my students | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Tips on becoming a computational number theorist

Posted on June 16, 2020 by Persiflage

How would you advise a student who has talents in both the computational and theoretical aspects of algebraic number theory? There is no hard border between computational and theoretical algebraic number theory, but there is a definite computational number theory … Continue reading →

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Families of Hilbert Modular Forms of Partial Weight One.

Posted on June 3, 2020 by Persiflage

Today I would like to talk about a beautiful new theorem of my student Eric Stubley (see also here). The first version of Eric’s result assumed (unknown) cases of the general Ramanujan conjecture for Hilbert modular forms, and relied on … Continue reading →

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Picard Groups of Moduli Stacks update

Posted on May 27, 2020 by Persiflage

A tiny update on this post. I was chatting with Benson and realized that I may as well ask him directly for a presentation of the mapping class group of a genus two surface. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it can be found … Continue reading →

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

Panel Discussion: Mathematics Research Online

Posted on May 13, 2020 by Persiflage

Odds are high that virtual conferences in mathematics are here to stay. It seems crucial, therefore, to think long and hard about ways to make them work for all participants. We need to have conversations as a community to better … Continue reading →

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