Author Archives: Persiflage

What is my Kasparov Number?

Posted on November 27, 2013 by Persiflage

This has been a fun week in sport, what with England slaughtered at the Gabbatoir and Anand sliced up by Carlsen’s endgame magic. The latter games were fascinating if not necessarily exciting per se; consisting more of slow grinds rather … Continue reading →

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Local representations occurring in cohomology

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Persiflage

Michael Harris was in town for a few days, and we chatted about the relationship between my conjectures on completed cohomology groups with Emerton and the recent work of Scholze. The brief summary is that Scholze’s results are not naively … Continue reading →

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Abelian Varieties

Posted on October 30, 2013 by Persiflage

Jerry Wang gave a nice talk this week on his generalization of Manjul’s work on pointless hyperelliptic curves to hyperelliptic curves with no points over any field of odd degree (equivalently, \(\mathrm{Pic}^1\) is pointless). This work (link here) is joint … Continue reading →

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The problem with baseball

Posted on October 27, 2013 by Persiflage

Jordan Ellenberg, in a lovely slate article, explains perfectly what I don’t like about baseball. I think the fundamentals of baseball as a sport are sound. I like the pace of the game, the variation, the statistics, the quirkiness, the … Continue reading →

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Does Harvard discriminate in favour of Jews?

Posted on October 22, 2013 by Persiflage

In The American Conservative, Ron Unz published an essay that was ostensibly about whether the top Ivy schools discriminate against Asian students but, upon closer reading, was mainly concerned with arguing that Harvard/Yale/Princeton discriminate against white Gentiles in favour of … Continue reading →

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Who is D.H.J. Polymath?

Posted on October 20, 2013 by Persiflage

D.H.J. Polymath is the assumed collective pseudonym for the authors of a number of papers which have arisen as a result of the polymath project initated by Gowers. Presumably, since it is a matter of open record, one can go … Continue reading →

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Why is my paper taking so long to review?

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Persiflage

The question in the title does not refer to any of my own papers; rather, I want to *answer* the question from the perspective of an editor. Here, roughly, is how the sausage is made (this is a medium case … Continue reading →

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Virtual Congruence Betti Numbers

Posted on September 27, 2013 by Persiflage

Suppose that \(G\) is a real semisimple group and that \(X = \Gamma \backslash G/K\) is a compact arithmetic locally symmetric space. Let us call a cohomology class tautological if it is invariant under the group \(G\). For example, if … Continue reading →

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Life on the modular curve

Posted on September 24, 2013 by Persiflage

Alice and Bob live on the modular curve \(X_0(1) = \mathbf{H}/\mathrm{PSL}_2(\mathbb{Z})\). What does the world look like to them, assuming that they view the world in hyperbolic perspective? To those who are not used to hyperbolic geometry, there may be … Continue reading →

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Parenthood

Posted on September 9, 2013 by Persiflage

Some questions, I guess, one can’t be prepared for:

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