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bookworm arXiv

Published May 2, 2012 by lievenlb

One of the nicer tools around is bookworm arXiv which ‘is a collaboration between the Harvard Cultural Observatory, arxiv.org, and the Open Science Data Cloud. It enables you to explore lexical trends in over 700,000 e-prints, spanning mathematics, physics, computer science, and statistics’ posted on the arXiv.

One possible use is to explore the popularity of certain topics. Below is the graph of the number of papers submitted monthly to the arXiv in noncommutative geometry, quantum groups, cluster algebras and symplectic reflection (algebras).

The default gives the graphs in the percentage of all papers submitted, but it is better to change this to the number of papers (I think). Sadly, at present one can only search for one- and two-word phrases.

Extremely useful is that it gives you the full list of papers (with direct links to the papers) containing the search terms when you click on that months point in the graph. For example, there are 4 sheets of papers in noncommutative geometry for october 2011

Clearly, there are plenty of other fun uses for this bookworm. For example, you can graph the number of papers in a topic in function of the nationality of the submitter. Here are the papers in noncommutative geometry, submitted by people from the US, France, the UK and Italy.

Or, you can use it for vanity reasons, giving you the list of all papers containing a reference to your work, which may not always be a good idea, blood-pressure wise…

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the matrix reloaded

Published May 1, 2012 by lievenlb

The dinosaurs among you may remember that before this blog we had the ‘na&g-forum’ to accompany our master-class in noncommutative algebra & geometry.

That forum ran on an early flat-panel iMac G4 which was, for lack of a better name, baptized ‘the matrix’.

The original matrix did survive the unification of the three Antwerp universities and a move to a different campus but then died around bloomsday 2007 and was replaced by an intel iMac.

This second matrix did host a number of blogs and projects started (and usually ended rather quickly) such as ‘MoonshineMath’, a muMath-site called noncommutative.org, the ‘F-un Mathematics’ blog dedicated to the field with one element and, of course, this blog.

About a month ago matrix-II was replaced by a state-of-the-art iMac running 10.7. The transition went smooth apart from the fact that 10.7 doesn’t like ‘localhost’ but prefers ‘127.0.0.1’ in setting up wordpress blogs.

Besides neverendingbooks, matrix-III runs angs@t – angs+ which is the blog of the antwerp noncommutative geometry seminar. It will be revamped over the summer and will probably be the website for our renewed master-class, starting next year.

The ‘F-un Mathematics’ blog was dropped in the transition but still survives at Ghent University where it is managed by Koen Thas.

As far as NeverendingBooks is concerned i hope to make a fresh start with blogging and will try to get more structure in this site by changing to a responsive wordpress theme (‘These responsive, fluid, or adaptive WordPress themes, automatically adjust according to the screen size, resolution and device on which they are being viewed’).

As a result this page will look weird from time to time over the next week or so. My apologies.

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noncommutative geometry at the Lorentz center

Published March 24, 2012 by lievenlb

This week i was at the conference Noncommutative Algebraic Geometry and its Applications to Physics at the Lorentz center in Leiden.



It was refreshing to go to a conference where i knew only a handful of people beforehand and where everything was organized to Oberwolfach perfection. Perhaps i’ll post someday on some of the (to me) more interesting talks.

Also interesting were some discussions about the Elsevier-boycot-fallout and proposals to go beyong that boycot and i will certainly post about that later. At the moment there is still an embargo on some information, but anticipate a statement from the editorial board of the journal of number theory soon…

I was asked to talk about “algebraic D-branes”, probably because it sounded like an appropriate topic for a conference on noncommutative algebraic geometry claiming to have connections with physics. I saw it as an excuse to promote the type of noncommutative geometry i like based on representation schemes.

If you like to see the slides of my talk you can find the handout-version here. They should be pretty self-exploratory, but if you like to read an unedited version of what i intended to tell with every slide you can find that text here.

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