Some february 2017 newslets

[Posted on february 18, 2017.]

Firstly, some recent items:

• new AMS president Kenneth A. Ribet is interviewed in the Notices, and says in particular “in the next few years, the AMS will evolve in lots of ways in response to this strategic planning. The books will look different. There will be new journals. The AMS will respond to what we have heard from our membership“. I’m very curious to see whether these new journals will be like the (IMHO failed) APC-charging Proc AMS ser.B or the great Diamond OA Representation Theory.
• a recent and apparently groundbreaking (pun intended) paper by Plamen Stefanov, Gunther Uhlmann and Andras Vasy has been highlighted in Nature
• the topic of the summer school at Institut Fourier will be Arakelov Geometry while that of Jussieu will be Mapping Class Groups
• some of the intermediate CNRS results are now out, namely CR2 and CR1, but not yet those for DR2 (6 positions for a hyper-competitive list of initial candidates)

 

Also to be noted, two upcoming auctions:

• on march 14 (estimated at €20,000/30,000) in Paris, arare copy of the 1637 first edition of Descartes’ Discours de la Méthode (containing the famous appendix La Géométrie)
• on february 22 (estimated at €200/300) in Lyon, a 326 pages manuscript c.1810 on dynamics and other topics (author unknown) [edit: won by the floor at €280]

Finally, it appears this blog was started 10 years ago, in what was definitely another era: before Polymaths, MO, arxiv overlay journals…and all the new official youtube channels in math and beyond.

The currency of mathematics: ideas vs proofs

[Posted on february 12, 2017.]

Quanta magazine has come up with yet another stellar wide-audience article, this time by Kevin Hartnett on the work of several authors in symplectic geometry.

It contains this great quote by Mohammed Abouzaid:

“There are two conceptions of mathematics,” Abouzaid said. “There’s mathematics as: The currency of mathematics is ideas. And there’s mathematics as: The currency of mathematics is proofs. It’s hard for me to say on which side people stand. My personal attitude is: The most important thing in mathematics is ideas, and the proofs are there to make sure the ideas don’t go astray.”

It’s probably the most reasonable take on that topic.

Now what are other areas of mathematics that have been impacted by these two conceptions in recent years? Of course, the work of Perelman and the controversy with the Cao-Zhu paper quickly comes to mind, but this was then modified by Cao-Zhu within a few months so that the ideas-conception won in that instance.

Are there others, either form the distant past or the recent few years? Feel free to mention any, that’s be insteresting to study.

The mooring line, by Bernard Spragg NZ on flickr