Category Archives: Mathematics

Mysterious Formulae

Posted on November 15, 2014 by Persiflage

I’m not one of those mathematicians who is in love with abstraction for its own sake (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I can still be seduced by an explicit example, or even — quell horreur — a definite … Continue reading →

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In Brief

Posted on October 21, 2014 by Persiflage

The start of the academic year has a habit of bringing forth distractions, not least of all to someone as disorganized as me. So here are a few remarks in brief. The class number of \(\mathbf{Q}(\zeta_{151})^{+}\) is one. John Miller, … Continue reading →

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Applying for an NSF grant

Posted on September 26, 2014 by Persiflage

It’s not easy to write a good grant proposal. But it can be even harder to write one for the first time, especially if you’re not quite sure who will be reading your proposal. So today, I want to say … Continue reading →

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The nearly ordinary deformation ring is (usually) torsion over weight space

Posted on September 19, 2014 by Persiflage

Let \(F/{\mathbf{Q}}\) be an arbitrary number field. Let \(p\) be a prime which splits completely in \(F\), and consider an absolutely irreducible representation: \(\rho: G_{F} \rightarrow {\mathrm{GL}}_2({\overline{\mathbf{Q}}}_p)\) which is unramified outside finitely many primes. If one assumes that \(\rho\) is … Continue reading →

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The Artin conjecture is rubbish

Posted on September 10, 2014 by Persiflage

Let \(\rho: G_{\mathbf{Q}} \rightarrow \mathrm{GL}_N(\mathbf{C})\) be a continuous irreducible representation. Artin conjectured that the L-function \(L(\rho,s)\) is analytically continues to an entire function on \(\mathbf{C}\) (except for the trivial representation where the is a simple pole at one) and satisfies … Continue reading →

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K_2(O_F) for number fields F

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Persiflage

Belabas and Gangl have a nice paper ( Generators and relations for \(K_2({\mathcal{O}}_F)\), which can be found here) where they compute \(K_2({\mathcal{O}}_E)\) for a large number of quadratic fields \(E\). There main result is a method for proving upper bounds … Continue reading →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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