Tag Archives: Barry Mazur

What the slopes are

Posted on February 25, 2023 by Persiflage

Let \(f\) be a classical modular eigenform of weight \(k\), for example, \(f = \Delta\). The Ramanujan conjecture states that the Hecke eigenvalues \(a_p\) satisfy the bound \(|a_p| \le 2 p^{(k-1)/2}.\) A slightly fancier but cleaner way of saying this … Continue reading →

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30 years of modularity: number theory since the proof of Fermat

Posted on July 8, 2022 by Persiflage

It’s probably fair to say that the target audience for this blog is close to orthogonal to the target audience for my talk, but just in case anyone wants to watch it in HD (and with the audio synced to … 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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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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The last seven words of Kedlaya-Medvedovsky

Posted on January 14, 2020 by Persiflage

New paper by my student Noah Taylor! It addresses some conjectures raised by Kedlaya and Medvedovsky in this paper. Let \(\mathbf{T}\) denote the Hecke algebra acting on modular forms of weight two and prime level \(N\) generated by Hecke operators … Continue reading →

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En Passant VI

Posted on October 29, 2019 by Persiflage

I just learnt (from a comment on this blog) that Pierre Colmez hosts a wonderful page on Fontaine and Wintenberger here. I particularly recommend reading both the personal recollections of their friends and collaborators (sample quote from Mark: These \(p\)-adic … Continue reading →

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Read my NSF proposal

Posted on October 9, 2019 by Persiflage

Since this is NSF season, I took the opportunity to go back and look at some of my old proposals. I am definitely too shy to put my *most recent* proposal online, but I thought it might be interesting to … Continue reading →

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Jean-Marc Fontaine, 1944-2019

Posted on March 4, 2019 by Persiflage

The results which generate the most buzz in mathematics are usually those which can be expressed in an elementary (or at least pithy) way to a general mathematical audience. It is certainly true that such results may be profound (see … Continue reading →

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Tips for new postdocs

Posted on January 20, 2019 by Persiflage

In my role as junior hiring chair, I’ve been thinking a little bit about how a (R1) institution can best serve its postdocs. Many find the transition from graduate student life to being a postdoc somewhat of a rude shock. … Continue reading →

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More or less OPAQUE

Posted on October 16, 2018 by Persiflage

I recently talked with Lynnelle Ye (a soon to be graduating student of Mark Kisin) for a few hours about her thesis and related mathematics. In her thesis, she generalizes (in part) the work Liu-Wan-Xiao on the boundary (halo) of … Continue reading →

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