Lieven Le Bruyn has relaunched his weblog under the new name Moonshine Math. The planned focus is monstrous moonshine.
Lieven converted some of the posts from the blog’s former life to PDF. You can find a links to the listings here.
Category Archives: Mathematics
Rumors of the abc conjecture
In late May, Peter Woit posted that Lucien Szpiro had announced a proof of the abc conjecture at the Goldfeld conference. In comments here, commenter Z passes along a rumor (with emphasis on rumor) that Szpiro’s proof has a significant flaw. Peter has updated his post to mention he’s hearing similar things.
Peter links to a couple of resources on the conjecture, which implies several other results (including most famously Fermat’s Last Theorem): The abc conjecture home page, and a survey article by Dorian Goldfeld.
Tenth Carnival of Mathematics
The tenth Carnival of Mathematics is up at Math Notations. The next carnival will appear at Grey Matters.
Elsevier Ends Arms Fairs
Elsevier, one of the major commercial academic publishers, had the curious side business of hosting arms fairs. After pressure from customers and authors, they have decided to exit the business.
Via Crooked Timber.
Final Word on “Latest Paper on ArXiv”
Bernhard Krötz has added another update on Tribikram Pati’s preprint. He now reports that the paper does not in fact disprove the Riemann hypothesis. Details provided by a colleague.
Ninth Carnival of Mathematics
The ninth Carnival of Mathematics is up at JD2718. It’s shockingly alphabetical for a collection of math posts.
Real Reductive Groups
John Armstrong has written an overview of the representation theory of real reductive groups, based on a series of lectures by Gregg Zuckerman. The focus is providing enough background to understand the significance of the Atlas of Lie Group’s highly touted announcement. I particularly recommend the first post as a whirlwind introduction to the theory:
Congratulations to David Corfield
Congratulations to David Corfield, who’s obtained a permanent position at the University of Kent at Canterbury.
Things I Learned From Websurfing
I learned several things today from websurfing.
From this comment by elzoro at Not Even Wrong, I learned that Richard Borcherds now has a weblog. The two posts so far are about physics.
From this comment by Peter Woit that the latest issue of the journal Topology is out, and the page that lists the editors is completely blank. (Remember that last year the entire board of Topology resigned to protest the journal’s high subscription fees, and started their own journal, the Journal of Topology.) I think that the publisher has to keep the journal going at all costs, since if the former editors of Topology succeed in completely supplanting their erstwhile journal, the commercial publishers will lose control of mathematical publishing pretty quickly.
From this anonymous comment at Computational Complexity, completely and cynically explains the rationale behind the Clay Millenium Prizes:
The point of the Clay prizes is not to provide motivation to solve the problems (anyone who solves one will have put in far more effort than a million dollars warrants), but rather to tie Clay’s name to the problems, so that nobody will ever discuss the Poincare conjecture without talking about Clay. To accomplish this, the prize has to be impressively large, on the scale of a lottery prize.
Latest on Latest Paper on ArXiv
A couple of months ago I linked to Tribikram Pati’s purported proof that the Riemann Hypothesis was false.
Bernhard Krötz has been working his way through the paper and posting periodic updates in the comments of that post. He has completed this project, and in his opinion the proof is correct.
I would still be surprised if this is really how the Riemann Hypothesis meets its doom, but Bernhard deserves recognition for taking the time to read the paper carefully and keeping us updated.