Upcoming conference: Workshop on operator algebras and conformal field theory in Eugene March 30, 2010
Posted by Ben Webster in conferences, QFT.2 comments
I wanted to take a moment to plug a conference in my soon-to-be hometown Eugene, OR organized by my once and future colleague Nick Proudfoot.
Aside from Eugene being lovely in August, I felt this conference was worth a post because it’s something of a unique format. Rather than being a bunch of experts on the subject (as it says in the title, the subject is the conjunction of operator algebras and CFT) getting together and giving talks that only they understand, it will be aimed at being educational for graduate students and interested non-experts (such as myself). The format is a bit similar to that of Talbot. In particular, in addition to an organizer (Nick) it has a “leader” who is in charge of mathematical content (but will delegate quite a few of the lectures); that will be the incomparable Andre Henriques. (more…)
Actual headline: “Hyperbolic Geometry Defeats Nazi Spoons in Odd Title Contest” March 26, 2010
Posted by Ben Webster in differential geometry.14 comments
The best part is, it actually happened. A British trade magazine has a contest every year to find the oddest book title, and this year winner is that classic of applied mathematics: “Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes”. Admittedly, this isn’t exactly the highest honor in the book-publishing world, I think any publicity for hyperbolic geometry is good publicity. I’ll confess though, I would have voted for “Collectable Spoons of the Third Reich.”
More math news March 25, 2010
Posted by Noah Snyder in math life.27 comments
In more parochial math news, my alma mater has hired Sophie Morel. This means that after 374 years we finally have a woman as a full professor. I don’t believe in congratulating a school for doing something that’s at least 75 years overdue (I hear that Emmy Noether was on the market in 1933), but as an alum I’m certainly relieved that this is no longer a continued source of embarrassment. This is just the first step, and I look forward to the day when Harvard has at least two women on faculty, like both of the other institutions I’ve been affiliated with.
Speaking of Prof. Morel, her advisor Gerard Laumon has quite the string of superstar students. Anyone know what the current record is for who has the most students with Fields medals?
Tate has won the Abel prize March 24, 2010
Posted by David Speyer in math life.2 comments
For those who haven’t heard yet, the Abel prize this year has been awarded to John Tate. Marcus du Sautoy has written an excellent survey of some of Tate’s work.
Wanted: page of tax info for NSF fellows March 23, 2010
Posted by Noah Snyder in inside baseball, NSF madness, things I don't understand, WANT.33 comments
So I think something that the world needs is a page with important bits of knowledge and tricks concerning having an NSF graduate or postdoctoral fellowship and paying taxes. The somewhat tricky thing is that you’d need an actual lawyer involved at some point in the process. Is this something one could try to convince the NSF’s accounting department to do? Presumably it’d be easy for the right person to do, and would save a lot of time for NSF Fellows who could then do math instead of trying to figure out taxes.
Here’s some examples of the sort of questions this page could answer:
- In what ways is NSF income taxable? (My understanding, which is not legal tax advice, is that you must pay income tax on this money by writing “SCH $$$” on the dotted line next to box 7, but you do not need to file a Schedule C nor a Schedule SE nor pay FICA/self-employment tax.)
- Is it possible to efile when you have taxable scholarship and fellowship income? Or do you have to print out the form in order to write “SCH $$$” on the dotted line next to box 7? (The rumor in the dept. today was that someone knew how to get TurboTax to enter the SCH thing, but none of us actually there knew.)
- How is the “research allowance” treated? My understanding, which again is not tax advice, is that since this is only for reimbursement it is not income.
- How are health care costs treated? At Columbia they apparently treat your health care as taxable income issuing you a 1099-MISC for non-employee compensation. This seems contrary to my readings of both the 1099-MISC instructions (where one of the criteria for issuing a 1099-MISC is that there were services rendered) and to section III.B.3. of the NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship Solicitation. But presumably Columbia’s accountants know what they’re doing. Nonetheless it’s extremely difficult to figure out what this money means. Is it FICA taxable? Do I have to file a Schedule C? What are my business expenses if it’s a business that didn’t actually do anything but yet was given money for no reason and then spent all its money on my healthcare? Why didn’t Berkeley issue me a 1099-MISC for the portion of my fees that went to medical care in graduate school? Is it possible to know in advance which schools treat health insurance money this way? If it’s self-employment money then I could wind up paying 15% FICA + 9% State and City + 25% Federal of $6K because of Columbia’s accounting.
Anyone have other good questions? Know anywhere to find answers to these questions?
Wilczek: What is Space? March 17, 2010
Posted by Scott Carnahan in Uncategorized.7 comments
Frank Wilczek gave an impressive physics colloquium at MIT last month, called “What is Space?” and it really gave me a new view of the physical world. I had read about spontaneous symmetry-breaking in quantum field theory texts, but I had not appreciated that the space around us can be viewed as a condensate. This was also the first time I’ve heard the word “superconductor” used in the sense he meant, but it seems like a somewhat natural generalization after some pondering.
He put up slides of his talk here (warning: this file did not agree with the Firefox on Linux in my office, but I was able to view it in Safari at home), but there were a couple differences between the slides and the lecture he gave. First, he only presented the first 2/3 of the slides, so it was interesting to read the slides that he rejected and tossed to the end. Second, in the talk, he really emphasized the point that truly empty space is a fundamentally explosive medium, because quark-antiquark pairs have negative energy. In particular, the space we see is quite full of such pairs, which mutually repel, so there is an equilibrium concentration. Also, these pairs are made of real particles, and are not virtual (although I don’t understand the significance of this statement). I had never seen this idea before, and I wonder if the negative energy claim is a result of some reasonably recent lattice QCD computations, or if I’ve simply failed to pay attention in the past.
At the end, there were a lot of questions from the audience about extra dimensions and strings, and he ducked all of them. I had been meaning to ask if he expected the nature of the condensates to change in or near the event horizon of a black hole, but unfortunately, I was unable to think of a good way to say it in English words at the time.
Is this a LaTeX bug? March 11, 2010
Posted by David Speyer in Latex.17 comments
I just discovered the following behavior, which seems counterintuitive to me. I’d like to claim I actually found a bug in LaTeX, but that seems unlikely. Still, I’m curious whether someone can explain the logic behind this.
Try to compile the following
\begin{Theorem}[ \cite[Theorem 1]{Gauss} ]
Every integer is the sum of three triangular numbers.
\end{Theorem}
You’ll get
Runaway argument?
Theorem 1)
! Paragraph ended before \@citex was complete.
\par
l.8 \begin{Theorem}[ \cite[Theorem 1]
{Gauss} ]
?
Putting the citation in curly brackets fixes the problem.
That doesn’t make sense to me. The parentheses matching is completely unambiguous; the entire string “\cite[Theorem 1]{Gauss}” must be the optional argument of the Theorem environment. Why can’t LaTeX parse this?
Details: Document class amsart, pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10, LaTeX2e.
New arxiv interface for authors: go update your papers! March 11, 2010
Posted by Scott Morrison in the arXiv.8 comments
If you have any papers on the arxiv which have since been published, very likely you are amongst the many mathematicians who have neither added the journal reference to the arxiv article metadata, nor updated the arxiv copy to match the final (post-refereeing) version.
Go do this, right now.
The reason I’m so boldly telling you to do this is that it’s now easier than ever. On March 5, the arxiv rolled out a new submissions interface, and also added a new interface for managing your papers. This shows a list of your papers (and hints on how to claim others that a coauthor submitted, but that the arxiv hasn’t connected to you), with links for replacing or providing a journal reference. Adding a journal reference is particularly easy — it doesn’t require replacing the paper and the whole process involves filling out a single form. You can also give a DOI (which you can lookup on mathscinet, or your journal’s webpage), which will make it much easier in the future for automated tools to identify an arxiv eprint with the “official version”.
EDIT: (Ben) I would also suggest making sure all your papers are connected to your “public author identifier” especially if you have the same last name as another mathematician. Hopefully this will essentially make life easier for all of us.
Google Public Data Explorer March 8, 2010
Posted by Scott Morrison in Uncategorized.5 comments
Google.org just announced their Public Data Explorer, with which you can very quickly and easily examine many interesting statistics. Here’s an example I cooked up in a less than a minute:
Life expectancy and fertility, with point size infant mortality.
This shows the relationship between life expectancy and fertility rates; colours code regions, point sizes indicate infant mortality rates. If you follow this link, you can easily modify the graph, use a slider to instantly look at historical, and cook up your own examples.
Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but I was so impressed by this tool that I’m hoping other mathematicians might like to explore it too. The particular graph I’ve shown is something I’ve been interested in for a while. Consider the very simple model in which parents want to be 95% certain that they have at least two children that survive to adulthood. Pretending this is the only determining factor in fertility rates, you can now compute fertility rates as a function of infant mortality. Tools like this provide amazing access to data, to quickly confirm or invalidate models like this, and to suggest other models.
Draft piece on Math Overflow for the Notices March 5, 2010
Posted by Scott Morrison in math life, Math Overflow.47 comments
Ravi Vakil, Anton Geraschenko and I are writing an opinion piece for the Notices about Math Overflow. Following in the fine tradition that John Baez started with his opinion piece about mathematical blogging, we’d like to post our draft here, and ask for suggestions and criticism!
Note that we’re working inside a fairly strict ~800 word limit for an opinion piece, so if you tell us to add a whole new section, expect to be disappointed. (On the other hand, we are listening for ideas about things that you feel should be covered in a longer article, as we’re writing one of those too!) Particularly helpful would be advice from anyone who’s standing a little bit further away from Math Overflow than we are, and can point out any background or context we’re implicitly assuming of the reader.
