Ars Mathematica

We here at Ars Mathematica set back the course of complexity theory by several hours, and Scott Aaronson thanks us for it.

I’m back from vacation. With any luck, I’ll even think of something to say. Until that happens, I wanted to link to Peter Woit’s post, Open Access Publishing, which links to this CERN task force report on the subject. I haven’t read the report, but Peter’s description makes it sound pathetically timid. As he characterizes it:

The CERN task force doesn’t seem to me to be providing a viable long-term plan for moving to the kind of open access model they are supporting. It doesn’t address the fundamental problem of keeping a system where physicists hand over the scientific literature to Elsevier, then have to figure out how to buy it back.

I ran across this journey to understand Poincaré and thought I would pass it on. I am a big fan of the idea of popularizations, and am especially enamored with the “you too could have invented X”  leitmotif that is statrting to emerge in that space (I read your version on CS Monads, sigfpe. it only made me like the form more). This link isn’t in that vein, but any effort is a worthwhile one in my book. It is a work in progress, so I am worried about commenting on it, but I am interested in people’s opinion of it. Is it off target for any particular audience other than the author? By that I mean the people who know the math will think too little is being said, while the ones who do not will be under the impression the trees are occluding the forest. More to the point, is any popularization doomed to such a critique?

I missed these a couple of months ago when they came out. But, if you are looking for something to do this Labor day (in the US anyway, I’m currently in the UK and finding it difficult not to write “Labour”), here are the problems for the 47^th International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO): day 1 and day 2. Have fun!

The latest issue of the e-journal, Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, has a nice summary article by Michael Huth on his work using topology for computer program semantics (vol. 161, pp. 3–23, 2006).

I will be away from my computer for the Labor Day weekend here in the United States, so there will be no posts from me for the next couple of days.

John Baez links to several letters from Grothendieck that have been posted on the Web. The most famous, of course, is Pursuing Stacks, which circulated for many years in photocopy form.