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version pi

Published November 10, 2004 by lievenlb

Now
that versions 2 and 3 of my abandoned book project
noncommutative~geometry@n are being referenced (as suggested) as
“forgotten book” (see for example Michel's latest paper) it is
perhaps time to consider writing version $\\pi$. I haven't made up
my mind what to include in this version so if you had a go at these
versions (available no longer)
and have suggestions, please leave a comment. An housekeeping-note :
this blog is flooded with link-spammers recently so I did remove the
automatic posting of comments. I use the strategy proposed by Angsuman to combat
them. This sometimes means that I overlook a comment (this morning I
discovered a lost comment while cleaning up the spam-comments, sorry!)
but it is the only way to keep this blog poker-casino-sex-etc free. It
goes without saying that any relevant comment (positive or negative)
will be approved as soon as I spot it.

At the moment I
haven't the energy to start the writing phase yet, but I am slowly
preparing things

  • Emptied the big antique table upstairs
    to have plenty of place to put things.
  • Got myself a laser
    printer and put it into our home-network using AirportExpress which
    allows to turn any USB-printer into a network-printer.
  • Downloaded the Springer Verlag Book Stylefiles svmono.zip. This
    does not mean that I will submit it there (in fact, I promised at least
    one series-editor to send him a new version first) but these days I
    cannot bring myself to use AMS-stylefiles.
  • Accepted an
    invitation to give a master-course on noncommutative geometry in Granada in 2005 which, combined with
    the master-class here in Antwerp next semester may just be enough
    motivation to rewrite notes.
  • Bought all four volumes of the
    reprinted Winning Ways for your
    Mathematical Plays     as inspiration for fancy terminology and notation
    (yes, it will be version $\\pi$ and _not_ version $e$).
  • etc.
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on fundamentalism

Published November 9, 2004 by lievenlb


Politicians have a tendency to jump on bandwagons. After Theo Van
Gogh was murdered by a Dutch-Maroccan there has been a unanimous outcry
to tackle 'Muslim Fundamentalists' both in the Netherlands and
Belgium. The Belgian interior minister came on television assuring the
public that he will shut down all fundamentalist internet sites…
His teenage children should tell him some basic facts of life.
In
Belgium all politicians stumble over each other to convince us how tough
they will act against extremism (they mean of course Islamic
fundamentalism), well let us see what they will do now with the extreme
right party 'Vlaams Blok' which was convicted today (in appeal)
for racism! Nothing of course, we can all easily see fundamentalism in
other people but rarely in ourselves.
It is not a big secret that
I admire Jeanette Winterson, but rarely did I agree more with one of her
montly columns than her november column. Just one paragraph :

There is very little difference between Islamic Fundamentalism and
Christian Fundamentalism. Both groups will use holy text to justify
their murders and their misogyny. Both groups believe that they are
right and that everyone else is wrong. Both groups are anti-science,
both prefer faith over facts. Ironically, both are united against the
values of liberal Western culture.

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reading backlog

Published November 8, 2004 by lievenlb

One of the things I like most about returning from a vacation is to
have an enormous pile of fresh reading : a week's worth of
newspapers, some regular mail and much more email (three quarters junk).
Also before getting into bed after the ride I like to browse through the
arXiv in search for interesting
papers.
This time, the major surprise of my initial survey came
from the newspapers. No, not Bush again, _that_ news was headline
even in France. On the other hand, I didn't hear a word about Theo Van
Gogh being shot and stabbed to death in Amsterdam. I'll come
back to this later.
I'd rather mention the two papers that
somehow stood out during my scan of this week on the arXiv. The first is
Framed quiver moduli,
cohomology, and quantum groups by Markus
Reineke. By the deframing trick, a framed quiver moduli problem is
reduced to an ordinary quiver moduli problem for a dimension vector for
which one of the entries is equal to one, hence in particular, an
indivisible dimension vector. Such quiver problems are far easier to
handle than the divisible ones where everything can at best be reduced
to the classical problem of classifying tuples of $n \\times n$ matrices
up to simultaneous conjugation. Markus deals with the case when the
quiver has no oriented cycles. An important examples of a framed moduli
quiver problem _with_ oriented cycles is the study of
Brauer-Severi varieties of smooth orders. Significant progress on the
description of the fibers in this case is achieved by Raf Bocklandt,
Stijn Symens and Geert Van de Weyer and will (hopefully) be posted soon.

The second paper is Moduli schemes of rank
one Azumaya modules by Norbert Hoffmann and Urich Stuhler which
brings back longforgotten memories of my Ph.D. thesis, 21 years
ago…

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