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This week at F_un Mathematics (1)

Published October 11, 2008 by lievenlb

In case you haven’t noticed it yet : I’m not living here anymore.

My blogging is (at least for the moment) transfered to the F_un Mathematics blog which some prefer to call the “ceci n’est pas un corps”-blog, which is very fine with me.

Javier gave a talk at MPI on Soule’s approach to algebraic geometry over the elusive field with one element $\mathbb{F}_1 $ and wrote two posts about it The skeleton of Soule’s F_un geometry and Gadgets a la Soule. The rough idea being that a variety over the field with one element only acquires flesh after a base extension to $\mathbb{Z} $ and to cyclotomic integers.

I did some posts on a related (but conceptually somewhat easier) approach due to Alain Connes and Katia Consani. I’ve tried to explain their construction at the level of (mature) undergraduate students. So far, there are three posts part1, part2 and part3. Probably there is one more session to come in which I will explain why they need functors to graded sets.

In the weeks to come we plan to post about applications of this F_un-geometry to noncommutative geometry (the Bost-Connes system) and Grothendieck’s anabelian geometry (the theory of dessins d’enfant). I’ll try to leave a short account of the main posts here, but clearly you are invited to feed your feedreader this.

Perhaps I’ll return here for a week mid november to do some old-fashioned vacation blogging. I have to admit I did underestimate Numeo.fr. Rumours have it that our place is connected wirelessly to the web…

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the future of… (3)

Published September 11, 2008 by lievenlb

It is always great to hear about new and clever ways to use blogs and the internet to promote (and hopefully do) science better. So, I’m a keen consumer of the Flash-presentations of the talks at the Science in the 21st century conference. Bee of Backreaction is one of the organizers and has a post on it as does Woit of Not Even Wrong.

Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles gave an entertaining talk titled Talking to My Dog about Science: Weblogs and Public Outreach. Not that much about the dog bit except that two of his blog-posts explaining physics to his dog landed him a book contract (book scheduled to appear early 2009).



He compared two ways of communicating scientific discoveries : the Newtonian way (aka publishing in peer reviewed journals) aiming deliberately to make your texts only readable to the experts, versus the Galileian way (aka blogging or science-journalism) trying to find a method to maximize your readership and concluded (based on history) that the Newton-manner is far better for your career…

Jacques Distler of Musings continued his crusade to convince us to use mathML for TeX-rendering in Blogs, Wikis, MathML: Scientific Communication. Of course he is right, but as long as the rendering depends on the client to install extra fonts I’m not going to spend another two weeks sanitizing this blog to make it XHTML-compliant. We’ll just have to wait for html5 and compatible browsers…

A talk I found extremely interesting was The Future is a Foreign Country by Timo Hannay of the Nature Publishing Group on the new challenges facing publishers in times of internet.



Above a text-message filed in as homework (‘describe your holiday’). When Timo decrypted it, I had to think about my old idea of writing a course using only text-messages…

Truly shocked was I when I saw the diagram below in Paul Ginsparg’s talk Next-Generation Implications of Open Access



It depicts the number of submissions to the arXiv by day-time of submission over 24hours. I would have expected a somewhat smooth pattern but was totally blown away by the huge peak around 16hrs. I’ll let you discover the mystery for yourself but it seems to be related to the dead-line for submission, the corresponding order the papers are mentioned in the emails send out, and its effect on the number of references these papers get within the first year…

Somewhat unlucky was Victor Henning in his talk Mendeley: A Last.fm for Research? when he wanted to demonstrate the mendeley web-interface but lost his internet connection…



Still, it seems like a good initiative so I’ve registered with the mendeley site, downloaded the software and hope to explore it over the coming days. I really hope this will turn out to be the one web2-idea catching on among the mathematics-community…

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the future of this blog

Published August 6, 2008 by lievenlb

Some weeks ago Peter Woit of Not Even Wrong and Bee of Backreaction had a video-chat on all sorts of things (see the links above to see the whole clip) including the nine minute passage below on ‘the future of (science) blogs’.

click here to see the video

The crucial point being that blogging takes time and that one often feels that the time invested might have been better spend doing other things. Bee claims it doesn’t take her that long to write a post, but given their quality, I would be surprised if it took her less than one to two hours on average.

Speaking for myself, I’ve uploaded two (admittedly short) notes to the arXiv recently. The shorter one took me less time than an average blogpost, the longer one took me about the time I need for one of the better posts. So, is it really justified to invest that amount of time in something as virtual as a blog?

Probably it all depends on the type of blog you’re running and what goal (if any) you want to achieve with it.

I can see the point in setting up a blog connected to a book you once wrote or intend to write (such as Not Even Wrong or Terry Tao).

I can also understand that people start a blog to promote their research-topic or to have a social function for people interested in the same topic (such as Noncommutative Geometry or the n-category cafe).

I can even imagine the energy boost resulting from setting up a group-blog with fellow researchers working at the same place (such as Secret Blogging Seminar or the Everything Seminar and some others).

So, there are plenty of good reasons to start and keep investing in a serious mathematical blog (as opposed to mere link-blogs (I won’t mention examples) or standard-textbook-excerpts-blogs (again, I’ll refrain from giving examples)).

What is needed is either a topical focus or a clear medium term objective. Unfortunately, this blog has neither…

At present, I feel like the journalist, spending too much time getting into a subject merely to write a short piece on it for today’s paper, which will be largely forgotten by tomorrow, but still hoping that his better writings will result into something having a longer half-life…

That is, I need to reconsider the future of this blog and will do so over a short vacation. As always, suggestions you might have are welcome. Perhaps I should take the bait offered by John McKay in his comment yesterday and do a series on the illusory 24-dimensional monster-manifold.

At the very least it would take this blog back to the only time when it was somewhat focussed on a single topic and was briefly called MoonshineMath. But then, even this is not without risks…



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