Category Archives: Mathematics

Nobody Cares About Your Paper

Posted on May 6, 2018 by Persiflage

I handle quite a few papers (though far fewer than other editors I know) as an associate editor at Mathematische Zeitschrift. Since the acceptance rate at Math Zeit is something in the neighbourhood of 20%, there are certainly good papers … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Politics, Rant | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Chicago Seminar Roundup

Posted on April 28, 2018 by Persiflage

Here are two questions I had about the past two number theory seminars. I haven’t had the opportunity to think about either of them seriously, so they may be easy (or more likely stupid). Anthony Várilly-Alvarado: Honestly, I’ve never quite … Continue reading →

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The boundaries of Sato-Tate, part I

Posted on April 8, 2018 by Persiflage

A caveat: the following questions are so obvious that they have surely been asked elsewhere, and possibly given much more convincing answers. References welcome! The Sato-Tate conjecture implies that the normalized trace of Frobenius \(b_p \in [-2,2]\) for a non-CM … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

The paramodular conjecture is false for trivial reasons

Posted on January 15, 2018 by Persiflage

(This is part of a series of occasional posts discussing results and observations in my joint paper with Boxer, Gee, and Pilloni mentioned here.) Brumer and Kramer made a conjecture positing a bijection between isogeny classes of abelian surfaces \(A/\mathbf{Q}\) … Continue reading →

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Hiring Season

Posted on January 7, 2018 by Persiflage

Lizard 1: Wait, explain again why we bury our young in the sand and thereby place them into mortal peril? Lizard 2: So they develop character! If it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for them. (Feel free … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Politics, Rant, Travel | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Abandonware

Posted on December 25, 2017 by Persiflage

For a young mathematician, there is a lot of pressure to publish (or perish). The role of for-profit academic publishing is to publish large amounts of crappy mathematics papers, make a lot of money, but at least in return grant … Continue reading →

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The ABC conjecture has (still) not been proved

Posted on December 17, 2017 by Persiflage

The ABC conjecture has (still) not been proved. Five years ago, Cathy O’Neil laid out a perfectly cogent case for why the (at that point recent) claims by Shinichi Mochizuki should not (yet) be regarded as constituting a proof of … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Politics, Rant | Tagged , , | 34 Comments

Graduation Day

Posted on November 26, 2017 by Persiflage

This last summer, I undertook my last official activity as a faculty member at Northwestern University, namely, graduation day! (I had a 0% courtesy appointment for two years until my last Northwestern students graduated.) Here I am with four of … Continue reading →

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Abelian Surfaces are Potentially Modular

Posted on November 11, 2017 by Persiflage

Today I wanted (in the spirit of this post) to report on some new work in progress with George Boxer, Toby Gee, and Vincent Pilloni. Edit: The paper is now available here. Recal that, for a smooth projective variety X … Continue reading →

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Schaefer and Stubley on Class Groups

Posted on October 28, 2017 by Persiflage

I talked previously about work of Wake and Wang-Erickson on deformations of Eisenstein residual representations. In that post, I also mentioned a paper of Emmanuel Lecouturier who has also proved some very interesting theorems. Today, I wanted to talk about … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Students | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment