Category: amazing
The Lost World
I. Opening the Airlock While I was in Arizona last week (running a study group for this year's Arizona Winter School on perfectoid spaces), I took the opportunity to visit another world, 50 minutes outside of Tucson. Dreamt up by a group…
Sawin on Severi's Conjecture
One of my favorite questions is: for which \(g, n, p\) is the moduli space of \(n\)-pointed genus \(g\) curves \(\mathscr{M}_{g,n, \mathbb{F}_p}\) unirational/uniruled? Will Sawin has just posted a beautiful paper on the ArXiv answering…
Jie Liu on projective space
Exciting news! Jie Liu has proven a conjecture of mine -- thereby resolving an old conjecture of Sommese. I'll briefly explain his result in this post.
Biospheres
This is Biosphere 1: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="2048"] Photo Credit: The NASA Deep Space Climate Observatory. [/caption] And this is Biosphere 2: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="700"] Photo Credit: Wikipedia User Joh…
The Typographical Equivalent of a Knife Fight
I've been thinking recently about typefaces -- the four to eight readers of this blog may have noticed that the font used in the body text of these posts has changed. I've also been thinking about best practices for mathematical typesett…
Varieties with infinitely generated automorphism group
John Lesieutre has just sent me an exciting new preprint in which he constructs a smooth projective variety \(X\) such that \(\text{Aut}(X)\) is discrete, and \(\text{Aut}(X)\) is not finitely generated. Whether or not such varieties exi…
Integral House
I'm teaching Calculus III at Columbia this semester, and am kind of amazed at the exploitative prices charged for Stewart's Calculus, 8th Edition, "Early Transcendentals" . (Not that anyone knows what "Early Transcendentals" are). On the…
My Hero
This is a picture of Alexander Grothendieck, taken near the end of his life: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="2448"] You shall not pass! [/caption] I took this picture of a page in a book that was just lying around in Oberwolfach…