Author Archives: Persiflage

The decline and fall of Publications Mathématiques de l’lHÉS

Posted on August 15, 2014 by Persiflage

I want to discuss the decline of a once great journal. How did IHES go from this: and this: to this: It is a sad state of affairs. To be clear, I am talking about the typesetting here. The old … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Waffle | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Is Serre’s conjecture still open?

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Persiflage

The conjecture in this paper has indeed been proven. But that isn’t the entire story. Serre was fully aware of Katz modular forms of weight one. However, Serre was too timid was prudently conservative and made his conjecture only for … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A flat white, please

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Persiflage

Thanks to the New York Times, I can now order a flat white at my local cafe instead of an 8 ounce latte. Culture is coming to America, my friends!

Posted in Food, Waffle | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Horizontal Vanishing Conjectures.

Posted on August 8, 2014 by Persiflage

Let \(F\) be a number field, and let \(\mathbf{G}\) be a reductive group over \(F\), and let \(\Gamma\) be a congruence subgroup of \(\mathbf{G}(\mathcal{O}_F)\). I can hear BC objecting that this doesn’t make sense without extra choices; if you have … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Abelian House is not closed

Posted on August 3, 2014 by Persiflage

Today I will talk about \(\displaystyle{\frac{97 + 26 \sqrt{13}}{27} = 7.064604\ldots}\) For an algebraic integer \(\alpha\), the house \(\overline{|\alpha|}\) is the absolute value of the largest conjugate of \(\alpha.\) Kronecker proved the following: If \(\overline{|\alpha|} \le 1\), then either \(\alpha … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The distribution of Hecke eigenvalues, part II

Posted on August 1, 2014 by Persiflage

Here are some numbers from KB promised in my last post. “For the first 61595 newforms of squarefree level coprime to 15 here’s the field extension of Z/3Z generated by the \(a_5\) field extensions:” \([\mathbf{F}_3(a_5):\mathbf{F}_3]\) Total Number Number of Galois … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The distribution of Hecke eigenvalues, Part I

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Persiflage

Here is a question I raised at the Puerto-Rico conference during one of the “problem sessions.” Toby Gee seems to remember that I had some half-baked heuristics that predicted both A and B below, but perhaps one of my readers … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

En Passant IV

Posted on July 19, 2014 by Persiflage

My students Richard Moy and Joel Specter have uploaded their paper on partial weight one Hilbert modular forms, previously discussed here, to the ArXiv. Germany now leads the world in both soccer and perfectoid spaces. This is a recipe for … Continue reading →

Posted in Waffle | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A public service announcement concerning Fontaine-Mazur for GL(1)

Posted on July 12, 2014 by Persiflage

There’s a rumour going around that results from transcendence theory are required to prove the Fontaine-Mazur conjecture for \(\mathrm{GL}(1)\). This is not correct. In Serre’s book on \(\ell\)-adic representations, he defines a \(p\)-adic representation \(V\) of a global Galois group … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Report from Luminy

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Persiflage

For how long has Luminy been infested with bloodthirsty mosquitoes? The combination of mosquitoes in my room with the fact that my bed was 6′ long with a completely unnecessary headboard (which meant that I had to sleep on an … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment