Ars Mathematica

My laptop was still under warranty, so I took it back to the store to get it fixed. They originally told me it would be “a few days”, but then they decided to send it back to the manufacturer to repair. And it’ll take four weeks! Mercifully, my warranty includes a loaner, so I have a temporary laptop. It’s a newer laptop, which would make me sad that it’s so much faster than my old laptop, but fortunately it runs Vista so that’s not a problem. Vista’s main features seem to be a) translucent windows, and b) if you let IE run for a couple of hours right-clicking stops working entirely.

With any luck, some sort of normal posting schedule will resume.

My computer has met a horrible fate, which is making it hard to update the site. I’m creating this open thread for anyone who has anything on their mind while I find an alternative. Michael Costantini asked in this old thread if anyone was interested in talking about Serge Lang. Michael knew him back in the 70s.

(My computer was a laptop. Every laptop I’ve ever owned breaks in the same way — the power supply stops working. Does this happen to anyone else? Do I generate my own magnetic field, like Magneto, and that’s why my laptops break? How does Magneto websurf? I guess he has no other outlet for his energies than supervillainy.)

The mysterious figure known only as “Robbie” upgraded our WordPress installation. Let us know if anything has broken. The only noncosmetic difference is that we are experimenting with captchas. Now, I hate captchas with the white hot fury of a thousand suns, but the amount of spam that was getting through the Akismet filter and requiring manual deletion was making me yearn for death, so I’ll leave captchas enabled to see how they work out.

Our internet service (cable) was down all day today. It was fixed when the cable guy brought a new modem (plus hours of fiddling by us to get it to work right). Megan is convinced that the cable guy was an idiot, and he accidentally hit on the right solution. We started discussing whether he could be said to have “known” and I started wondering if this was a rare real-world example of a Gettier problem. (I’m not really clear on what it means for a belief to be “justified” so I’m not sure.)

In other internet news, my e-mail provider has started dropping mail sent to my Ars Math address. I apologize if you sent me a mail and I did not get it. I’ll be switching providers shortly.

Just a quick survey question. Now that comment registration has been turned off, is there any interest in open threads?

I’ve gotten complaints recently about Ars Math’s comment registration system, so as an experiment, I’ve enabled users to post comments without registering. Here’s hoping that I get to spent part of the next 24 hours not deleting spam…

The big math story in 2006 was the publication of complete proofs of the Poincare conjecture, and subsequent events. In August, Grigori Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal for his role in the proof, which he turned down. At the same time the New Yorker published its famous article about Perelman and Shing-Tung Yau.

Ars Mathematica ran 224 posts for the year. The most popular post (judged by the number of comments) was Michael’s Who are you…who who, who who, which asked everyone to talk about their favorite subject. The second most popular was my unprovoked attack on category theory, Opinions of Category Theory. The third most popular, interestingly enough, was Hartry Field, which featured a detailed and substantive debate on Field’s interpretation of mathematics.

The post I am personally most proud of is Grete Hermann, which describes the contributions of an undeservedly obscure figure in twentieth century mathematics and physics. My New Year’s resolution for 2007 is to actually complete some of the partially-written posts I started in 2006 (I’m up to 60).

I just discovered a cool little tool/site, MimeTeX. MimeTeX, the tool, renders TeX formulas into GIFs. The program does not itself use TeX or TeX fonts, but rather implements a subset. MimeTeX, the site, actually allows you to generate GIFs from TeX formulas directly at the site. This might be handy for creating the occasional image for weblog posts.

I will be out of town for a few days for Thanksgiving, so there won’t be any posts from me for the next few days.

Mathematical textbooks take pains to make their subject appear to form a unified whole. Is any such unity an illusion? Discuss.

Chris Hillman, creator of Entropy on the World Wide Web and Relativity on the World Wide Web, will be joining us as a poster on Ars Mathematica.