## Archive for the ‘academia’ Category

### Some december 2017 news

December 4, 2017

[Posted on december 4, 2017.]

In no particular order :

• the paper of Mohan Ganesaligam and Sir Timothy Gowers appeared earlier this year in the Journal of Automated Reasoning (ironically, a Springer journal in which it appears they had to pay an APC to have it ‘open access’). Looking at papers which cite it I’ve stumbled upon ALEXANDRIA, a EU-funded project lead by Lawrence C. Paulson. There is in particular a detailed description of actions which shows that, if I understand well, while it finds the human-legible aspect of the G&G paper interesting, it finds the use of formal libraries important, and will directly in result in stuff usable in Isabelle. Lawson’s PhD student Wenda Li has several interesting formal proofs papers, again in the context of Isabelle.  Another paper citing G&G is this one by Joseph Corneli et al., which also looks extremely interesting and from an entirely different angle! If only days had 48 hours…
• the Prizes season is in full swing. The 2018 Breakthrough Prizes have been announced : Christopher Hacon and James McKerman are the laureates for their work on the minimal model program (which previously earned them the Cole Prize in Algebra among others ; incidentally, this Cole Prize has just been won by Robert Guralnik this year). Also, 4 New Horizons in Mathematics Prizes went to Aaron Naber  (see e.g. this 3 part video on Yang-Mills Theory : part1 part2 part3), Maryna Viasovska (topically, Henry Cohn won the Conant Prize for his paper on the sphere packings story), Zhiwei Yun and Wei Zhang (both for their Annals of Mathematics paper in particular, see also Quanta Magazine).
• the Fermat Prize went to Simon Brendle and to Nader Masmoudi.
• Physicist Slava Rychkov (currently at ENS) has been named permanent professor at IHES
• Edward Frenkel announced two weeks ago that Shinichi Mochizuki had sent the final versions of his papers for approval. I think I saw it said that it had been submitted to a Japanese journal, but this is probably not Pub. RIMS since Mochizuki himself seems to serve as its editor-in-chief. Time will tell…
• Christie’s will look to sell next week for at least USD10,000 a 1952 copy of the issue of Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. which contains Turing’s paper on morphogenesis
• if you are a mathematics student in France, you should go to the Forum Emploi Math next week.

Peacock dance display, by Marco Verch on flickr

### Some november 2017 items

November 11, 2017

[Posted on november 11, 2017]

Some recently spotted items :

Hexagons in the arch. Glanum, october 2017. Public Domain.

### Some october 2017 news

October 12, 2017

[Posted on october 12, 2017]

Some recent news :

• Vladimir Voevodsky’s death has been a shock to many, see IAS resources here (including the video of the Remembrance Gathering), see also a Quanta Magazine article of yesterday
• a very new generalist Diamond OA journal is proposed by ENS de Rennes under the name Annales Henri Lebesgue, it has a strong editorial board and no accepted papers just yet (I’ve learnt about its existence while browsing  the program of an upcoming conference of Réseau National des Bibliothèques de Mathématiques)
• Misha Gromov put yesterday on the arXiv a long paper, and finishes it with the sentence “Non-accessible Articles. There is a dozen or so other papers on Gehring linking problem but, since they are not openly accessible, one can not tell what is written in there.” If that type of statement generalizes that could quickly make the guilty authors consider arXiving their work…
• Astrophysicist Konstantin Batygin has teamed up with Dynamical Systems expert Alessandro Morbidelli to release a beautiful paper that adds a good theoretical underpinning to the Planet Nine hypothesis
• Giovanni Coppola has recently claimed a conditional proof of the Twin Prime Conjecture (among others) based on a Delange Hypothesis

### The Genestier-V.Lafforgue preprint is out, and V.Lafforgue’s crypto-currency proposal for refereeing

September 6, 2017

[Posted on september 6, 2017.]

Alain Genestier and Vincent Lafforgue have very recently posted a preprint which is the long-awaited follow-up to V.Lafforgue’s 2012 paper on the Langlands Correspondance (whose current version of august 2017 seems to be close to print, since it acknowledges the “extremely thorough” input from several referees).

On V.Lafforgue’s webpage there is a very interesting note from january 2017 titled A proposition to give value to the work of referees which introduces the idea of a crypto-currency to reward referees (!), provides concrete technical specifications to implement and test the idea, and explores potential drawbacks.

I haven’t seen it discussed on the web yet, but I very much hope it will become widely read, and that a suitable version will emerge and be given a try by several large institutions…

Programmer’s laptop by Wall Boat on flickr

### Early september 2017 items

September 3, 2017

[Posted on september 3, 2017.]

Various short news :

• Go Yamashita has posted a few days ago his version of Shinichi Mochizuki’s work on the abc conjecture (and he also has posted an excerpt of an email which, together with a footnote, alludes to some unethical behaviour from a certain I.F. Hopefully, whether or not it is the case, this type of controversy will stay away from the math itself.)
• the arXiv overlay journal Épiga has finally released its first papers
• it has been announced today that the french Secretary of State in Digital Affairs, Mounir Mahjoubi, has asked Cédric Villani to write a report on how France should define a strategy for the coming years regarding the rise of AI, due in 3 months (it will start from the report done 6 months ago on the topic)
• earlier this summer, the Comité de candidature à l’organisation de l’ICM 2022 issued a communiqué saying that although the IMU had stated a preference for St-Petersburg and that it was customary for other candidacies to withdraw before the next Genral Assembly, they would still present the candidacy of Paris next year…
• a high-quality conference on Differential Geometry will be held at IHÉS next december in memory of the late Marcel Berger
• US-based mathematicians have the opportunity to apply to the collaboration grants of the Simons Foundation announced this week
• Norbert Blum has withdrawn his paper on P vs NP
• today at least Annals of Mathematics is running low on papers in the to appear section (I wonder if an issue ever got delayed due to a lack of accepted papers…)

Logic cookies by Steve Rainwater on flickr

### News roundup, and binary Cantor orthogonality

August 15, 2017

[Posted on august 15, 2017.]

Summer news:

***

Completely unrelatedly, here’s probably another useless idea from this blog’s host. Consider a sequence $(a_n)_{n\in\mathbb{N}^*}$ of binary numbers in $[0,1]$ such that the number of digits of $a_n$ is at least equal to $n$ for all $n$. Then one can apply Cantor’s diagonal argument to extract a number that is uniquely defined (since a digit different from $0$ must be $1$ and vice versa) and different from all the $a_n$. Call the resulting number the “binary Cantor orthogonal” of that sequence. Can it have any useful properties?

Let’s look at the following example: $a_n:=[1/p_n]_2$, the binary version of the inverse of the $n-$th prime. That is, we do:

$\displaystyle \begin{array}{ccl} \frac{1}{2}& =& 0.1\\ \frac{1}{3}& = & 0.01010101\dots \\ \frac{1}{5}& =& 0.001100110011\dots\\ \frac{1}{7}&=& 0.001001001001\dots\\ \frac{1}{11}&=& 0.0001011101\dots\\ \vdots \end{array}$

then extract the diagonal of the decimal parts and invert it modulo 2. The resulting sequence is 0,0,0,1,1,1,0,0,1,0,1,0,0,1,1,0,0… Unfortunately, the OEIS doesn’t know this particular sequence, so there’s probably nothing noticeable here.

Jardin des Roses in Rennes (a small area of this marvel).

August 2017. Public domain

### Cédric Villani and other academics at Assemblée Nationale

June 25, 2017

[Posted on june 25, 2017.]

Some observations on the newly elected members of Assemblée Nationale:

***

In other news:

• Jean-Pierre Kahane passed away at 90
• Peter Scholze, who has recently been elected to the Leopoldina, has a recent preprint titled Étale cohomology of diamonds which is not yet on the arXiv.
• a 10-year-old in Cameroon who enjoys math is nearing the end of the high school curriculum there, hopefully he’ll then get the University-level education he deserves (and surely he’s not the only one)
• I’ve updated my list of Diamond OA journals in mathematics to include Acta Mathematica and Arkiv för Matematik
• a strange editor’s note in the current issue of Annals of Mathematics, whereby they withdraw a 2001 paper without saying why, and it appears that the paper was never cited in the 16 ensuing years (at least according to google scholar), which is very odd.[update: see this story on Retraction Watch (h/t anon)]

Paris, France by Bob Hall on flickr

### The currency of mathematics: ideas vs proofs

February 12, 2017

[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

### Mirzakhani, Lindenstrauss, Witten, McMullen, Zelmanov sign petition against Trump’s immigration EO

January 28, 2017

[Posted on january 28, 2017.]

Fields Medalists Maryam Mirzakhani, Elon Lindenstrauss, Curtis T. McMullen, Edward Witten and Efim Zelmanov are, with several other prominent US-based mathematicians, among the earliest signatories of the Academics Against Immigration Executive Order petition, and well done to them ! [Edit: Terence Tao and Vladimir Voevodsky also signed.][Further edit: so have Pierre Deligne, Vladimir Drinfeld and Andrei Okounkov.] [Further edit: the members of the Board of Trustees of the AMS also signed and issued a statement.]

### All Cedram journals are now Diamond Open Access

January 17, 2017

[Posted on january 17, 2017.]

As mentionned previously on this blog, starting this month all Cedram journals are now Diamond Open Access, so it adds Annales de la Faculté des Sciences de ToulouseAnnales Mathématiques Blaise Pascal, and  Journal de Théorie des Nombres de Bordeaux to the others.  A fantastic piece of news, and I’ve updated my list of DOA Mathematics Journals to reflect this.

***

In other news:

•  Olivia Caramello has put online her recent HDR Thesis as well as the (very laudatory) referee report
• Notices of the AMS has a nice piece by Henry Cohn on the sphere packing breakthrough
• talks by Emmanuel Lepage and by Wojtek Porowski on Shinichi Mochizuki’s IUT are taking place in Nottingham

Cliffs of Moher by khdc on flickr

(Alternative title: ‘compromise’ is not a swear word)