neverendingbooks – Page 234

25 years monstrous moonshine

Published April 21, 2004 by lievenlb

Writing a survey paper is a highly underestimated task. I once
tried it out with \’Centers of generic division algebras : the
rationality problem 1965-1990\’ and it took me a lot of time and that
was on a topic with only 10 to 15 key papers to consider… The task of
writing a survey paper on a topic with any breadth must be much more
difficult. Last week, Terry Gannon posted a survey paper on the arXiv :
Monstrous Moonshine : The first twenty-five years
which gives a very readable introduction to this exciting topic. It has
a marvelous opening line :

It has been approximately
twenty-five years since John McKay remarked that
196 884 = 196 883 +
 1

Anyone who is puzzled by this line (“So what?”)
should definitely have a go at this paper! Still not convinced? Here is
the second sentence :

That time has seen the discovery of
important structures, the establishment of another deep connection
between number theory and algebra, and a reinforcement of a new era of
cooperation between pure mathematics and mathematical
physics.

For the remaining sentences (quite a few, the paper
is 33 pages long) I happily refer you to the paper.

artistic and other frustrations

Published April 17, 2004 by lievenlb

Yesterday, PD1 exhibited some of her paintings in the Antwerp Museum for Photography. Over breakfast this morning she was in a rare angry mood.

No, she was satisfied with the responses she got on her work, the room was not ideal (lighting etc.) but that was not what mattered…

Me : So?

She : There was this other work, a video-performance. I once saw by accident on Arte a short-film and this performance stole the whole idea of that film, from start to finish! The whole idea was nicked!

Me : Wake up! That’s the majority way of creating art, or science for that matter.

She : But it is so unfair! Why do people steal ideas ?

Me : Maybe they don’t see it as stealing. Maybe they believe they do a better thing with the original idea than the person who invented it.

She : Nothing can beat the original! Anyway, I find the most rewarding thing about art to come up with an original idea and work it out. It cannot be rewarding to steal other people\’s ideas.

Me (dry) : I think such people are after other rewards…

She : The same thing happens at school. Sometimes I come up with a suggestion to use a different technique or material and then a few weeks later, half of my class seems
to have worked this out too.

Me : So ? You still had the idea.

She : Yes, but the Jury doesn’t know that!

Me : So ? After the Jury you can still be confident to come up with new ideas, these others may fear they will only be able to repeat themselves.

She : But is it so unfair!

Me : What’s the alternative ? Are you going to lock yourself up in your room to
paint and let nobody see the result?

She : No, but I prefer to do my painting here at home, on my own with nobody looking over my shoulder constantly to see whether they can use some of my ideas. I will
paint on my own and only when it is fully finished they may see the result!

Me : That’s the spirit girl! You are much cleverer than I will ever be…

a spider for Paul Smith’s list

Published April 16, 2004 by lievenlb

One
of the best collections of links to homepages of people working in
non-commutative algebra and/or geometry is maintained by Paul Smith. At regular intervals I use it to check
up on some people, usually in vain as nobody seems to update their
homepage… So, today I wrote a simple spider to check for updates in
this list. The idea is simple : it tries to get the link (and when this
fails it reports that the link seems to be broken), it saves a text-copy
of the page (using lynx) on disc which it will check on a future
check-up for changes with diff. Btw. for OS X-people I got
lynx from the Fink Project. It then collects all data (broken
links, time of last visit and time of last change and recent updates) in
RSS-feeds for which an HTML-version is maintained at the geoMetry-site, again
using server side includes. If you see a 1970-date this means that I
have never detected a change since I let this spider loose (today).
Also, the list of pages is not alphabetic, even to me it is a surprise
how the next list will look. As I check for changes with diff the
claimed number of changed lines is by far accurate (the total of lines
from the first change made to the end of the file might be a better
approximation of reality… I will change this soon).
Clearly,
all of this is still experimental so please give me feedback if you
notice something wrong with these lists. Also I plan to extend this list
substantially over the next weeks (for example, Paul Smith himself is
not present in his own list…). So, if you want your pages to be
included, let me know at lieven.lebruyn@ua.ac.be.
For those on Paul\’s list, if you looked at your log-files today
you may have noticed a lot of traffic from www.matrix.ua.ac.be as
I was testing the script. I\’ll keep my further visits down to once a
day, at most…

neverendingbooks Posts

25 years monstrous moonshine

artistic and other frustrations

a spider for Paul Smith’s list