Late april items

[Posted on april 30, 2016]

In no particular order :

• the latest issue of Gazette de Mathematiciens has just appeared, it  includes an introduction to the Berkovich line by Jérôme Poineau, and also part of an exchange between Alice Jacquet and Claire Mathieu on the work of the latter and her collaborators on the emergence of a glass ceiling in social networks (here is the paper of Mathieu et al itself, and note also a talk about this at BNF next month) among lots of other things
• Claire Voisin has very recently been elected to the newly created Chaire de Géométrie Algébrique du Collège de France
• an article from the Harvard Crimson about tenure choices in the math departement
• a curious case of nearly full Open Access : Elsevier-owned Comptes Rendus Mathématiques will henceforth provide some of its articles for free, for that the corresponding author must have a french affiliation (technically, an email at an insitution based in France) otherwise the article will stay behind a paywall for readers but with the strange and fortunate freedom to post the final pdf on the institutional server of the authors (but not on a preprint server for 3 years).
• the Spiegel has recently featured Peter Scholze (behind a paywall)

Low clouds over the lake, by claudiadea131 on flickr

That arXiv questionnaire, and other news

[Posted on april 16, 2016]

Filling that arXiv questionnaire (now offline) was interesting. No idea how many people answered, and more importantly how biased that sample will turn out to be. I hope, for the sake of transparency, that they’ll quickly make the numbers freely available (the free-comment sections are of course private).

Also, it’s informative to see how varied opinions can be. I do agree with some points made by Izabella Laba in her blog post : no comments please (think low quality MO questions that quickly and deservedly get many downvotes, or the sometimes very irrelevant comments made by amateurs on blogs). That would surely drive lots of serious folks away. Some people agree, others don’t. On the other hand,  flagging “substantial overlap” could be useful if properly defined, IMHO.

As for citations stats and tools, taking a well-known preprint that never got formally published, by just clicking on the NASA ADS link one easily gets useful citation tools, while the blog trackbacks are suitably moderated. Not sure what could be added on top of that.

In other news :

• topically, a math.GM paper on Navier-Stokes made it to a local story…
• a wonderfully clear and interesting talk by Mireille Bousquet-Mélou at CIRM (in french, but with slides in english) on plane lattice paths avoiding a quadrant, a topic related to a series of works done in the past 15 years by lots of people (and where many nice things occur, like the issue of finiteness or not of a certain group naturally associated to the path counting method)
  

• an interview of Manjul Bhargava in CNRS News made after the conference mentioned in the previous post
• a job ad for a mathematician in the gaming industry in Dublin

Early april news

[Posted on april 5, 2016]

In no particular order :

• Laurent Lafforgue recently gave a colloquium (direct link to the mp4 file) on Grothendieck Toposes in Nantes “based on his conversations with Olivia Caramello” (he is announcing a long common text in the process of being written, to appear on his website at some point)
• registration opened a few days ago for the summer school at Institut Fourier on Geometric Analysis, Metric Geometry and Topology
• a workshop on Geometric Langlands and a conjecture of Fargues is taking place this week in Oberwolfach, while a workshop on the work of Vincent Lafforgue will take place at AIM next december
• a recent and highly interesting AI paper that takes into account what makes things look natural to humans (inner sense of what is physically possible or not, and first-person view of the world) by Brenden M. Lake, Tomer D. Ullman, Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Samuel J. Gershman ; the fact that these gentlemen work at high-profile institutions will hopefully turn this paper into a kind of benchmark along which other folks will want to test their systems
• Manjul Bhargava gave several talks in Paris yesterday, including one on Ramanujan’s work (the movie is announced for september in France, but will be released in just a few weeks in several countries), as part of the UNESCO’s International Conference on the Zero

Blue in the shades, by coniferconifer on flickr