Because 'exact science is not always exact science.'
Congratulations to Hong Wang on winning the Fields Medal!! Hong Wang received her PhD degree from MIT in 2019, was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study from 2019 to 2021, and an Assistant Professor at UCLA from 2021 to 2023. Currently, she is a Professor of Mathematics at NYU Courant and a Continue reading "Congratulations to Hong Wang!"
A root of unity is a complex number such that for some positive integer . This means that for some integer ; if is relatively prime to , we say that is a primitive -th root of unity, meaning that is not a -th root of unity for any . Here s a question: when can Continue reading "Vanishing sums of roots of unity"
The Coven-Meyerowitz conjecture is a tentative characterization of finite sets that tile the integers by translations. It s also something I have been thinking about, on and off, for more than 2 decades; in the last few years, Itay Londner and I were finally able to make some progress on it. This post will provide a Continue reading "The Coven-Meyerowitz conjecture"
I had a blog once, right? Long story short, I have been attending to other priorities. This career has not been great for my health: it was a matter of chronic nuisance issues rather than anything immediately life threatening, but nonetheless there came a time some years ago when I had to step back and Continue reading "Update, January 2023"
This is the HTML version of my submission to the Proceedings of the JHU Workshop on Professional Norms in Mathematics, organized by Emily Riehl in September 2019. I gave a (virtual) presentation there, circulated a set of slides, and was in the process of writing a longer piece based on that when life started to Continue reading "Universities in the time of climate change"
Well it s been a break. I will not try to explain it. This is a personal blog, I do not get paid for it, and I m free to post as often or as rarely as I wish. I did plan other posts to restart it: one about math, another expanding on a workshop presentation I Continue reading "Diversity statements"
This post is for the men in mathematics who have been disturbed by the recent wave of disclosures and pushback against sexual harassment. You are horrified to learn that men have been doing such things, and you extend your sympathy to the victims, but you also need to know the possible implications for you. You ve Continue reading "As you do unto us"
Popular entertainment stories about prodigies tend to follow certain common threads. The prodigy is smart but poorly socialized and sometimes a bit of an asshole. If well-meaning people can talk him off that perch, we get a happy ending ( Good Will Hunting ). If on the other hand a controlling parent or guardian figure is allowed Continue reading "Gifted while female"
Leonard Cohen died on November 7, 2016. He was very popular in Poland in the 1970s and 80s, long before Hallelujah, before the world tours and the late commercial success. We loved our obscure-not-obscure artists, even as we misunderstood or misinterpreted them. We mispronounced his name ( Lee-oh-nard ). We didn t understand English well enough to get Continue reading "Of birds and wires"