Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Arthurian Legend

Posted on October 18, 2024 by Persiflage

Some time back, Kevin Buzzard (friend of the blog!) gave a series of talks in which he criticized certain aspects of the mathematical culture when it came to accepting proof. In addition to obvious targets like the classification of finite … Continue reading →

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Walter Neumann

Posted on September 30, 2024 by Persiflage

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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Persiflage, 2012-2024

Posted on July 23, 2024 by Persiflage

No, not a eulogy! I’ve been a bit concerned for a while about how stable wordpress is as a website — various plugins are always updating on their own, and I have sometimes noticed that old blog posts do not … Continue reading →

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ArXiv x 3

Posted on March 4, 2022 by Persiflage

Three recent arXiv preprints this week caught my interest and seemed worth mentioning here. The first is a paper by Oscar Randal-Williams, which considers (among other things) the cohomology of congruence subgroups of \(\mathrm{SL}_N(\mathbf{Z})\) in the stable range. This is … Continue reading →

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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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More on Lehmer’s Conjecture

Posted on March 21, 2020 by Persiflage

Lehmer said it was a “natural question” whether there existed an integer such that \(\tau(n)=0\) or not. I’ve wondered a little bit recently about how reasonable this is. (See this post.) The historical context is presumably related to the fact … Continue reading →

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Background for the Hausdorff Summer School

Posted on December 20, 2019 by Persiflage

For those attending the Haussdorf Summer School previously mentioned here, I followed up with the speakers to ask them a little about what background was optimal for getting the most out of their lectures. In particular, I asked them to … Continue reading →

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NSF Application Tips: LaTeX edition

Posted on September 6, 2019 by Persiflage

I’ve previously written about applying for an NSF grant here. But for those applying this year, I have a few further technical tips concerning the technical specifications of your LaTeX document. If you are the type of person who uploads … Continue reading →

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Administrative Note

Posted on September 5, 2019 by Persiflage

Ideally nobody will really notice, but this blog has moved from www.galoisrepresentations.wordpress.com to www.galoisrepresentations.com. This blog still runs on the (open source) wordpress system, the only difference is that it is longer hosted by wordpress. The reason for hosting this … Continue reading →

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The stable cohomology of SL(F_p)

Posted on June 19, 2019 by Persiflage

Back by popular demand: an actual mathematics post! Today’s problem is the following: compute the cohomology of \(\mathrm{SL}(\mathbf{F}_p)\) for a (mod-p) algebraic representation. Step 0 is to say what this problem actually is. It makes sense to talk about certain … Continue reading →

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