Secret Blogging Seminar

I’m writing to point out a potential law which should be gathering more opposition and attention in math academia: The Securing American Funding and Expertise from Adversarial Research Exploitation Act. This is an amendment to the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act which has passed the House and could be added to the final version of the bill during reconcilliation in the Senate. I’m pulling…

I’d been meaning to write a plug for my paper A self-dual integral form for the moonshine module on this blog for almost 7 years, but never got around to it until now. It turns out that sometimes, if you wait long enough, someone else will do your work for you. In this case, I recently noticed that Lieven Le Bruyn wrote up a nice summary of the result in 2021. I thought I’d add a little history o…

On Wednesday, I asked several of my students what tools they use to collaborate online on their problem sets. Several of them mentioned Discord. I am currently trying to set up a Discord channel for my class. I imagine I am not the only one in this situation, so I am writing up my progress as I go here . If you have relevant knowledge, please leave an answer to this question or edit mine! If you …

There has been a dispute running through mathematical twitter about diversity statements in academic hiring. Prompted by that, Izabella Laba has just written an excellent post, which affirms the importance of diversity as a goal, but lays out the many tricky issues with diversity statements. It makes a lot of points I would like to make, and raises others that I hadn’t thought of but should have.…

Jadagul writes: Got a draft of the course schedule for next year. Looks like I might get to teach real analysis. I probably need someone to talk me out of trying to do everything in R^n. A subsequent update indicates that the more standard alternative is teaching one variable analysis. This is my second go around teaching rigorous multivariable analysis — key points are the multivariate chain rul…

My CAREER grant includes funding for a thesis-writing fellowship for graduate students who have done extraordinary teaching and outreach during their time as a grad student. If you know any such grad students who are planning on graduating in the 2018-2019 school year please encourage them to apply. Deadline is Jan 31 and details here. While I’m shamelessly plugging stuff for early career people,…

I’m throwing this post up quickly, because time is of the essence. I had hoped someone else would do the work. If they did, please link them in the comments. As many of you know, the US House and Senate have passed revisions to the tax code. According to the House, but not the Senate draft, graduate tuition remissions are taxed as income. Thus, here at U Michigan, our graduate stipend is 19K and …

Readers may recall that during the 2013 “peak-Elsevier” period, Elsevier made an interesting concession to the mathematical community — they released all their old mathematical content (“old” here means a rolling 4-year embargo) under a fairly permissive licence. Unfortunately, sometime in the intervening period they have quietly withdrawn some of the rights they gave to that content. In particul…

A few weeks ago, I e-mailed Will Sawin excitedly to tell him that I could extend the new bounds on three-term arithmetic progression free subsets of to . Will politely told me that I was the third team to get there — he and Eric Naslund already had the result, as did Fedor Petrov. But I think there might be some expository benefit in writing up the three arguments, to see how they are all really …

There seems to be a rule that all progress on the cap set problem should be announced on blogs, so let me continue the tradition. Robert Kleinberg, Will Sawin and I have found the rate of growth of three-colored sum-free subsets of , as . We just don’t know it is that what we’ve found! The preprint is here. Let me first explain the problem. Let be an abelian group. A subset of is said to be free …

It is far from clear to me that Springer’s copyright agreement (quoted below) is compatible with posting your paper on the arXiv under the CC-BY license. Happily, a Springer representative has just confirmed for me that this is allowed: Let me first say that the cc-by-0 license is no problem at all as it allows […]

Here is a fun problem, with a great story and a surprising answer. According to the Talmud, in order for the Sanhedrin to sentence a man to death, the majority of them must agree to it. However R. Kahana said: If the Sanhedrin unanimously find [the accused] guilty, he is acquitted. (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, […]

Back in graduate school, I read a beautiful paper of Kenyon, Okounkov and Sheffield. It started with the following physical story. This is the corner of a crystal of salt, as seen under an electron microscope. (I took the image from here, unfortunately I couldn’t find better information about the sourcing.) As you can see, […]

We’ve just posted an ad for up to 3 continuing positions at the Mathematical Sciences Institute, at the Australian National University, in Canberra. (Where I work!) It’s up on mathjobs, but applicants will need to apply through the university website. Here’s the pitch: The Mathematical Sciences Institute at the Australian National University is seeking to […]

In this post we will give a heuristic derivation of a result of Vershik, describing the shape of a random partition of a large integer . (Vershik’s Russian original is available here; English translation is pay-walled.) By a partition of , we mean positive integers with . We draw a partition as a collection of […]

I’d like to make another attempt at a topic I handled badly before: How Legendre duality shows up in statistical mechanics (or, at least, toy models thereof). We are going to be considering systems with parts, and asking how many states they can be in. The answers will be exponential in , and all that […]

It is a minor spoiler to say why mathematicians will enjoy this story by Scott Alexander but I predict many of you will.

Update — there are now not one, but two, positions available! The application has been extended to the end of November. We’ve just put up an ad for a new 2 year postdoctoral position at the ANU, to work with myself and Tony Licata. We’re looking for someone who’s interested in operator algebras, quantum topology, […]

Those of you who are interested in college math instruction may be interested in a no-longer-so-new blog “Michigan Math In Action”, which a number of our faculty started last year. (I was involved in the sense of telling people “blogs are fun!”, but haven’t written anything for them yet.) It mostly features thoughtful pieces on […]

Just a quick reminder that, if you are looking for graduate support to attend ALGECOM at the University of Michigan on Saturday October 24, or to register for the poster session, you should please send an e-mail to speyer@umich.edu by Tuesday Sept 15. (Yes, after sunset but before midnight is fine, I won’t be online […]