Tag Archives: Gauss

The Ramanujan Machine is all hype

Posted on July 17, 2019 by Persiflage

Edit (17/02/21) I changed the title of this post which was unnecessarily incendiary. There’s a lot that I like about how mathematics operates as a social discipline. We have a great respect for the history of the subject, which in … Continue reading →

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En Passant V

Posted on July 7, 2019 by Persiflage

(warning: today’s persiflage comes with possible extra snark due to sleep deprivation) The Ramanujan Machine: I learnt from John Baez on twitter about The Ramanujan Machine, a project designed to “help reveal [the] underlying structure” of the “fundamental constants” of … Continue reading →

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Mazur 80

Posted on June 10, 2018 by Persiflage

Last week I was in Cambridge for Barry’s 80th birthday conference. If you are wondering why it took so long for Barry to get a birthday conference, that’s probably because you didn’t know that there was *also* a 60th birthday … Continue reading →

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Who proved it first?

Posted on April 25, 2017 by Persiflage

During Joel Specter’s thesis defense, he started out by remarking that the \(q\)-expansion: \(\displaystyle{f = q \prod_{n=1}^{\infty} (1 – q^n)(1 – q^{23 n}) = \sum a_n q^n}\) is a weight one modular forms of level \(\Gamma_1(23),\) and moreover, for \(p\) … Continue reading →

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The class number 100 problem

Posted on January 19, 2017 by Persiflage

Some time ago, Mark Watkins busted open the “class number n” problem for smallish n, finding all imaginary quadratic fields of class number at most 100 (the original paper is here) Although the paper describes the method in detail, it … Continue reading →

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What does it take to get a raise?

Posted on April 6, 2015 by Persiflage

Gauss … [had] a salary that remained fixed from 1807 to 1824. (see here.) What was Gauss’ salary? My limited google skills were not able to find this information, although I’m not sure how meaningful it would be to translate … Continue reading →

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