Other september 2016 items

[Posted on september 18, 2016.]

Recent items spotted :

• the passing of Jean-Christophe Yoccoz at the still young age of 59 has been unanimously lamented : SMF, CNRS, AMS, a french math forum… A conference had been planned for his 60th birthday next year.
• there’s a one day event due to occur at the end of the month in Rennes whose aim is to inform local mathematicians on the current state and planned evolution of scientific publishing, in particular regarding Diamond Open Access journals apparently
• the Hot Topics workshop at MSRI next march on Galois Theory of Periods and Applications is open for registration
• Michael Atiyah & Nicholas Manton have recently released a preprint introducing a model of neutral atoms that uses compact complex algebraic surfaces
• Edward Witten has asked a question on MathOverflow regarding some group cohomology formulas introduced by condensed matter physicists
• Robert A. Kucharczyk & Peter Scholze have just posted to the arXiv a paper constructing (for some, but not all, fields of characteristic 0) a certain compact Hausdorff space whose profinite fundamental group agrees with the absolute Galois group of that field
• for those with a few millions to spare, Sotheby’s will offer for auction John F. Nash Jr’s Nobel Prize medal next months…

 

Early september items

[Posted on september 4, 2016.]

An assortment of recent short news items :

• the work on Generalized Umbral Moonshine by Miranda Cheng, Paul de Lange & Daniel Whalen mentionned in a fine portrait of Cheng in the consistently excellent Quanta Magazine has been released on the arxiv last week
• the 3 conferences planned on the occasion of Nigel Hitchin’s 70th birthday will take place this week and the next
• also taking place this week is the introductory workshop around the work of Shinichi Mochizuki (possibly some live-tweeting may occur under #IUTABC)
• Alessio Figalli has now moved to ETH in Zürich (and has just reached 100 published papers, at only 32!)
• John Pardon has left Stanford to become Full Professor at Princeton (at only 26!)
• Yves André has recently announced a proof of the direct summand conjecture, using a perfectoïd Abhyankar lemma (apparently this is/was a central conjecture in commutative algebra, made in 1973 by Mel Hoscher), and so this is yet another example of the power of the framework developped by Peter Scholze
• not sure when it has been added (perhaps last year already), but the map feature of mathjobs is great, and complements nicely that of the EMS, while on jobs.ac.uk there’s an awesome announcement for a Research Assistant position at Oxford that mixes Big Data techniques with Roman numismatics

Metz, a farewell. (August  2016, Public Domain).