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Tag: teaching

irrelevant list

As
there is no way to recover from the previous post, allow me a slow
restart by listing some of the a-typical things done this week :

  • Ate more chocolate than during the last five years

  • Drove the car more than during the rest of the year (minus
    vacations)

  • Didn't do any bicycle exercise

  • Only checked email in the morning (at best)

  • Didn't do any math (apart from helping
    PseudonymousDaughter2)

  • Didn't go in to university at
    all

  • Drank even more coffee than usual

  • Regardless, felt exhausted every evening

  • Did far
    less web-surfing (but managed to find
    this
    on academic blogging)

  • Cooked fast and way too
    cholestorol-rich meals

  • Ate even more chocolates

Fortunately, the semester (and teaching)
starts tomorrow!

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driven by ambition and sloth

Here’s a part of yesterday’s post by bitch ph.d. :

But first of all I have to figure out what the hell I’m going to teach my graduate students this semester, and really more to the point, what I am not going to bother to try to cram into this class just because it’s my first graduate class and I’m feeling like teaching everything I know in one semester is a realistic and desireable possibility. Yes! Here it all is! Everything I have ever learned! Thank you, and goodnight!

Ah, the perpetual motion machine of last-minute course planning, driven by ambition and sloth!.

I’ve had similar experiences, even with undergraduate courses (in Belgium there is no fixed curriculum so the person teaching the course is responsible for its contents). If you compare the stuff I hoped to teach when I started out with the courses I’ll be giving in a few weeks, you would be more than disappointed.
The first time I taught _differential geometry 1_ (a third year course) I did include in the syllabus everything needed to culminate in an outline of Donaldson’s result on exotic structures on $\mathbb{R}^4 $ and Connes’ non-commutative GUT-model (If you want to have a good laugh, here is the set of notes). As far as I remember I got as far as classifying compact surfaces!
A similar story for the _Lie theory_ course. Until last year this was sort of an introduction to geometric invariant theory : quotient variety of conjugacy classes of matrices, moduli space of linear dynamical systems, Hilbert schemes and the classification of $GL_n $-representations (again, smile! here is the set of notes).
Compared to these (over)ambitious courses, next year’s courses are lazy sunday-afternoon walks! What made me change my mind? I learned the hard way something already known to the ancient Greeks : mathematics does not allow short-cuts, you cannot expect students to run before they can walk. Giving an over-ambitious course doesn’t offer the students a quicker road to research, but it may result in a burn-out before they get even started!

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NOG master class update


Yesterday I made a preliminary program for the first two months
of the masterclass non-commutative geometry. It is likely that
the program will still undergo changes as at the moment I included only
the mini-courses given by Bernhard
Keller
and Markus Reineke but several other people have
already agreed to come and give a talk. For example, Jacques Alev (Reims),
Tom Lenagan (Edinburgh),
Shahn Majid (London),
Giovanna Carnovale (Padua) among others. And in
may, Fred assures me, Maxim Kontsevich will give a couple of talks.

As for the contents of the two courses I will be
teaching I changed my mind slightly. The course non-commutative
geometry
I teach jointly with Markus Reineke and making the program
I realized that I have to teach the full 22 hours before he will start
his mini-course in the week of March 15-19 to explain the few
things
he needs, like :

To derive all the
counting of points formulas, I only need from your course:

the definition of formally smooth algebras basic properties, like
being
hereditary
– the definition of the component
semigroup
– the fact that dim Hom-dim Ext is constant along
components. This I need
even over finite fields $F_q$, but I
went through your proof in “One quiver”,
and it works. The
key fact is that even over $F_q$, the infinitesimal lifting
property implies smoothness in the sense Dimension of variety =
dimension of
(schematic) tangent space in any $F_q$-valued
point. But I think it’s fine for
the students if you do all
this over C, and I’ll only sketch the (few)
modifications for
algebras over $F_q$.

So my plan is to do all of
this first and leave the (to me) interesting problem of trying to
classify formally smooth algebras birationally to the second
course projects in non-commutative geometry which fits the title
as a lot of things still need to be done. The previous idea to give in
that course applications of non-commutative orders to the resolution of
singularities (in particular of quotient singularities) as very roughly
explained in my three talks on non-commutative geometry@n I now
propose to relegate to the friday afternoon seminar. I’ll be
happy to give more explanations on all this (in particular more
background on central simple algebras and the theory of (maximal)
orders) if other people work through the main part of the paper in the
seminar. In fact, all (other) suggestions for seminar-talks are welcome
: just tell me in person or post a comment to this post.

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