Category Archives: Mathematics

It’s not a Lemma, it’s a Proposition!

Congratulations to Ken for winning the the Steele prize. I first met Ken on the Hearst mining circle. It was September of 1997, during the time I was applying for graduate schools. I was visiting Danny on the way to … Continue reading

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“Fields of definition”

Can you help settle a disagreement? This is a debate about notation I am having with a colleague; I will try to present it without prejudice (and probably fail). Let \(G\) be a group, and let \(V\) be a finite … Continue reading

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Giving a good mathematics talk

Last week, Tadashi Tokieda came to Chicago to give a colloquium. If you have seen him speak, you will not be surprised to learn that it was absolutely delightful talk. I carried the talk around with me in my mind … Continue reading

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Walter Neumann

I recently learnt the sad news that Walter Neumann just passed away. Although I don’t think I have seen him in person for over 25 years, Walter was a pretty significant influence in my mathematical life. Here are some of … Continue reading

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Not quite what I meant

Weibo Fu wrote an interesting paper on upper bounds for spaces of Bianchi modular forms, pushing previous results of Simon Marshall and Yongquan Hu to get more or less optimal results in the weight aspect. More generally, for any number … Continue reading

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SL_n versus GL_n

I recently wrote a paper (with Toby Gee and George Boxer, see also here) on constructing regular algebraic automorphic representations \(\pi\) of (cohomological) weight zero and level one, and therefore also cuspidal cohomology classes in the cohomology of \(\mathrm{GL}_n(\mathbf{Z})\) for … Continue reading

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A talk on my new work with Vesselin Dimitrov and Yunqing Tang on irrationality

Here is a video of my talk from the recent 70th birthday conference of Peter Sarnak. During a talk one always forgets to say certain things, so I realized that my blog could be a good place to give some … Continue reading

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Zeilberger + ChatGPT

Since I don’t have maple, I can’t play with the following code: https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/tokhniot/MultiAlmkvistZeilberger.txt But is ChatGPT now good enough to re-write this in either pari/gp or magma (or Mathematica). I’m not sure how realistic this might be (without some serious … Continue reading

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Unramified Fontaine-Mazur for representations coming from abelian varieties

Mark Kisin gave a talk at the number theory seminar last week where the following problem arose: Let \(W\) be the Galois representation associated to the Tate module of an abelian variety \(A\) over a number field, and suppose that … Continue reading

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The horizontal Breuil-Mezard conjecture

Postdoc hiring season will be upon us soon! I have two excellent graduate students who will be applying for academic jobs soon, Chengyang Bao and Andreea Iorga. I have mentioned Chengyang’s first project before here and an introduction to the … Continue reading

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