2009–2026
1,487 posts
2026 76
October 2026
- THE MILWAUKEE BREWERS ARE THE WORLD CHAMPIONS OF BASEBALL
- “You Can See Everything”
- De-automating
- When the phone inside your ribcage rings, it’s not for me (They Might Be Giants show report)
- Eigenvalues of random p-adic matrices
- James Purdy, Narrow Rooms
September 2026
- I love working here, II
- I love working here
- Wisconsin sports analytics and beer tomorrow night!
- Finite-time blowup
- Don’t Be Too Sure dramatis personae
August 2026
July 2026
- Dream (Trade deadline)
- A photo of my father telling Daniel Patrick Moynihan to go take a hike
- Zhao Yu Ma on homological vanishing and optimal ranges
- Proposed World Cup rules change
- I saw the figure 7 in black
- Walking Red Flag
- US World Cup watch party, Wingra Park
- Save it for 2062, Peacock
- 250
- Oath is the campaign-donation allocation optimizer you’ve been looking for
June 2026
- Lou Reed and Ludwig Wittgenstein were first cousins
- On 7
- Game Theory, Linus and Lucy
- People are good and the system works, redux
- More shoulderblogging
- People are good and the system works
- Pete “Polar Bear” Alonso’s walkup song, in an ideal world
- Recent progress around Cohen-Lenstra heuristics (notes from a Bourbaki talk)
- The Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics
May 2026
- Human character, continuity of
- Nicknames for Ottawa, Illinois
- Memorial Day
- Is there a higher Belyi theorem?
- Brewers 5, Cubs 2
- Wittgensteinian aphorism (after six hours spent in the company of college undergraduates)
- Roger Brown on “Ms.”
- “My hatred of you has turned to pity”
- Blank life
April 2026
- Ellenberg-Li-Shusterman
- Alices
- Minor Epiphany Concerning the World Columbian Exposition of 1894 and John Hughes
- Brewers 8, Red Sox 6
- Armiversary
- The College Boy and His Problems
- Curse of the Badgerino
March 2026
- Sad Badgers
- In which my daughter invents science
- The Irrational Decision
- In which I flex music knowledge for my daughter
- The ex-prospect who only hit homers
- Two small appreciations of the culture of France
February 2026
- Networking and granfallooning
- In which I rescue Harvard’s grading system
- As an old calculus professor of mine used to say
- Waiting for Godot (Gen-X rewrite)
- Yankees Outright Yanquiel Fernandez
- Luck or loveliness
- Now pitching, Cadeler Wellvich
- George Birkhoff, faces made of lines
- What’s the entropy of a random integer?
January 2026
- It’s a good old-fashioned Wisconsin booger-freezer out there!
- Dick Gross
- If one is not to make a mess of life
- The encylopedia of triangle centers
- Bruhat intervals that are large hypercubes
- I’m holding out for the trigonometry of happiness
- Dyadiku
- Reaching the masses (not a Marxist post)
- Black Box Coat Factory
- Chowder was the national soup
2025 79
December 2025
- Merry Jewish Christmas!
- Self-portrait with about one quarter of Richard Serra’s sculpture Equal
- Rusczyk wins a Bezos
- The American people have just one fixed idea
- Save my life, I’m going down for the last time
- I said to myself, sit down
- How I know zombies aren’t real
- Pete Alonso is an Oriole
- One more on sphere packing/cap set/Turan
- Larry Agran is the Paul Soglin of Irvine, CA
- So disappointing
- Another example: sets of arcs and loops with bounded intersection
- “That’s an excellent question!”
November 2025
- Random Americans, ethnic stereotypes, and large language models
- “Not Vegan”
- Mathgiving
- I wrote about John von Neumann for the Free Press
- Sphere packing, cap set, and the Turán problem are all the same thing
- Madison West JV girls basketball: Regents 45, LaFollette Lancers 37
- Let us now praise United Airlines
- I reviewed a book about the math foundations crisis for the New York Times
October 2025
- The golden age of not hitting triples
- Triple chai
- International Conference on Ancient Magic
- A favorite tactic of the self-identified iconoclast
- MacArthur Fellows: Wisconsin and Williams
- This condition of ill-training
- Taylor Swift and Stephanie Burt, or: Life of a Harvard English Professor
September 2025
- Claudia Prieto, “Tus Ojos”
- To The Best of our Knowledge is finished
- I gave a talk about machine learning and math
- Social media hiatus
- Chadeish yameinu
- Global epistasis emerges from a generic model of a complex trait (or: random walks on a hypercube with reweighting)
- Pre-covers
- Mura Yakerson interviewed me
- Klartag improves the sphere-packing constant
- Bertrand Russell on rationality and math
- Yu Darvish has beaten 29 out of the 30 MLB teams
- The Yankees’ #2 prospect
August 2025
July 2025
- One more observation about Tom Lehrer
- RIPPP Tom Lehrer
- Doing less with less
- When your liver is sluggish
- Knowledge concerning the applicability of automatic computing machines to problems in pure mathematics
- Caden, Colin, Jaiden, Caden, Kailen, Dalton, Holden, Brayden, Brayan, Denton and Braeden
- A small thing
June 2025
- A history of the 21st century for Pittsburgh Pirates fans
- 2009 AL ROY nonprescience
- Happy Juneteenth
- Math and medicine webinar
- Bertrand Russell on touching grass
- Nigel Boston (1961-2024)
- Constructing lameness hierarchy using crowd-sourced data
May 2025
- A fang, a feeling, a flair, a match, a thing for you, levitation, my TV and my pills, New York
- Brewers 5, Orioles 2 / Orioles 8, Brewers 4
- That’s when everything went widdershins
- Get out of my dreams
- This and that
- A paleontologist, a scientist, a tree, decided, God, Superman, the leveler, the voice of Sarah Strickland’s rage, the walrus
April 2025
- St. Olaf, Carleton, UW-Madison, wholesomeness
- Another thing about the White Lotus
- I Just Saw a Face
- In which I have cursed the Baltimore Orioles
- Leeway
March 2025
- Aphorism
- A birthday message from Azat Miftakhov
- Substance-free dorm
- The best team in baseball history at not hitting into a double play
- An open letter on funding cuts at Columbia
January 2025
2024 28
December 2024
- Notes towards a logic puzzle
- Live at the Lunchable
- Three ways to apply AI to mathematics
- Makes no sense at all (an Orioles post)
- Twenty years ago I encountered Francis Bacon
- Dumbass Corners
- PatternBoost (Yet Another Paper About Math and AI)
- Time for a Change
- Lifetime achievement award
- Dream (frunk)
- T.S. Eliot (being dumb) on damnation
- Doomed (I met Whit Stillman)
November 2024
October 2024
September 2024
- Dead mouse, moral lesson
- Subriemannian parallel parking on the Heisenberg group
- The dispensable mathematician
August 2024
July 2024
June 2024
May 2024
April 2024
February 2024
2023 18
December 2023
November 2023
October 2023
August 2023
July 2023
May 2023
March 2023
- Learning a made-up language, III
- Lecture and egotism
- Fox-Neuwirth-Fuks cells, quantum shuffle algebras, and Malle’s conjecture for function fields: a new old paper
- I’d like to make a request, II
February 2023
- I’d like to make a request
- “The pandemic made things worse.”
- Learning a made-up language, II
- Learning a made-up language
- Uncontested touchdown
January 2023
2022 17
December 2022
October 2022
August 2022
June 2022
- Phillies 3, Brewers 2
- емкость is great (or: what I learned at the Writing Scientists Workshop)
- Padres 7, Brewers 0
April 2022
March 2022
February 2022
January 2022
2021 31
December 2021
November 2021
October 2021
September 2021
August 2021
July 2021
- GPT-3 me, by the book
- “I do it all better”
- The Milwaukee Bucks are the champions of the National Basketball Association
- Standard Form 171
- The Bottom Line – A CPA Story
June 2021
- This is it, right? This is as dogshit as the Orioles get?
- “God, as the Pythagoreans said, is a geometer-but not an algebraist”
- Pandemic social life as villanelle
May 2021
April 2021
March 2021
February 2021
- OedipaVision
- Matrices with low rank and root-of-unity entries, in the morning, in the evening
- A Saturday
January 2021
2020 54
December 2020
- Pandemic blog 46: the end (not actually the end)
- Pandemic blog 45: reading
- Pandemic blog 44: white Christmas
- Pandemic blog 43: bluster
November 2020
- Pandemic blog 42: Thanksgiving
- Pandemic blog 41: dream
- Pandemic blog 40: overdispersion?
- Pandemic blog 39: pandemic election
October 2020
- Pandemic blog 38: The greatest Ray/Dodger
- Pandemic blog 37: the short season
- Pandemic blog 36: undecided
- Pandemic blog 35: Updates
September 2020
August 2020
July 2020
- Pandemic blog 31: farmers’ market
- Pandemic blog 30: opening day
- Pandemic blog 29: Neowise, custard
- Pandemic blog 28: Smart Restart
June 2020
May 2020
- Pandemic blog 24: enter the gamma
- Pandemic blog 23: why one published research finding is misleading
- Pandemic blog 22: departures
- Pandemic blog 21: we all look like freedom fighters
- Pandemic blog 20: R_0, random graphs, and the L_2 norm
- Pandemic blog 19: a socially distanced mathematician reads the newspaper
- Pandemic blog 18: The Wisconsin Idea
April 2020
- Pandemic blog 17: bike
- Pandemic blog 16: links
- Pandemic blog 15: “lock them down”
- Pandemic blog 14: slimming
- Pandemic blog 13: Violent Frisbee
- Pandemic blog 12: for the sake of your fellow roofer
- Pandemic blog 11: Why do curves bend?
- Pandemic blog 10: I’m masked in the supermarket
March 2020
- Pandemic blog 9: The Class of 1895
- Pandemic blog 8: enter the hermit
- Pandemic blog 7
- Pandemic blog 6: safer at home
- Pandemic blog 5: exponential
- Pandemic blog 4: food
- Pandemic blog 3: usefulness, rules
- Pandemic blog 2: arm metaphor
- Pandemic blog 1
February 2020
- Commutativity, with fractions
- Maps of candidates from coconsideration
- Entitlement, age 9
- Political coordinates test
- The Omnivore’s Hundred
- A divergent sequence
- The American bar mitzvah, 1887
January 2020
2019 38
December 2019
- If you build it they will come and exploit it
- Two wards in Madison
- The real diehard
- “Hamilton”
- The Americans can retire at 42
- Shocking the carrots
November 2019
- Khot,Minzer,Safra on approximate sections of sheaves
- Pete Alonso was a Mallard
- Los Angeles, November 2019
October 2019
- Teaching-track positions at Washington University: a testimonial
- Morally problematic, even questionable
- The greatest Astro/National
- The quarter-circle game
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
May 2019
- Assembled audience
- When the coffee cup shattered on the kitchen floor
- Soumya Sankar: Proportion of ordinarity in families of curves over finite fields
April 2019
March 2019
February 2019
- Madison Feb 2019 primary: quick and dirty clustering
- Large-scale Pareto-optimal topologies, or: how to describe a hexahedron
- 22f
January 2019
2018 58
December 2018
- The great qualities with which dullness takes lead in the world
- Why is a Markoff number a third of a trace?
- It’s right by the airport
- Ringo Starr rebukes the Stoics
November 2018
October 2018
- The greatest Red Sox / Dodger
- Naser Talebizadeh Sardari, Hecke eigenvalues, and Chabauty in the deformation space
- Did I like Bleak House?
- NLCS game 2: Dodgers 4, Brewers 3
- dBs, Dentists
- If I have caught a foul ball it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants
September 2018
- 25 dishes that define Madison, and my takes on same
- No matter what new problem it sets for parents
- Why are the 2018 Orioles so bad, so very, very, very bad?
- Sinking Ships — The Cinema Clock
- Hmoob
August 2018
July 2018
- Unitarians, legislative districting, and fairness
- Wisconsin municipal vexillology update
- Look how much I saved you on this goddamn vacuum cleaner
- A type of unproductivity
- Dinner experiment
- Dane County Fair
- American Revolution
June 2018
- Heights on stacks and heights on vector bundles over stacks
- Two Hebrew words
- Rebecca Dallet and the gerrymandered Assembly map
May 2018
- Missing LeBron
- Did Tim Burns voters come through for Rebecca Dallet?
- Brewers 6, Marlins 5 / Bucks 104, Celtics 102 / Orioles 6, Tigers 0
April 2018
- The Lovasz number of the plane is about 3.48287
- The first pancake is always strangely shaped
- Ocular regression
- What is the Lovasz number of the plane?
- The chromatic number of the plane is at least 5
- Madison C. Peters seems like an interesting cat
- Which pictures do children draw with straight lines?
- “The Great Ph.D. Scam” (or: Academy Plight Song)
March 2018
- Fagone on Cash WinFall
- A Supposedly Fun Thing (a book review)
- Suriya Gunasekar, optimization geometry, loss minimization as dynamical system
- Scott Walker and the noncommutativity of Wisconsin statute, part II
- Bike/ski weekend
February 2018
January 2018
- Not even the most poorly paid shipping clerk
- I’m tryin’, I’m tryin’, I’m tryin’, I’m tryin’
- Hall of Fame ballots: some quick and dirty clustering
- Ursula K. LeGuin is dead
- Linger
- Farblandia
- Wanlin Li, “Vanishing of hyperelliptic L-functions at the central point”
- A rejection from Gordon Lish
- How I won the talent show
- Sex Has Thrown A Bomb Into Business
2017 45
December 2017
November 2017
October 2017
September 2017
August 2017
July 2017
- Good math days
- Show report: Camp Friends and Omni at the Terrace
- How many books do I read in a year?
- Lo!
June 2017
- When random people give money to random other people
- Driftless Father’s Day
- What I ate in Toronto
- Rational points on solvable curves over Q via non-abelian Chabauty (with Daniel Hast)
- Multiple height zeta functions?
- Elif Batuman, “The Idiot”
May 2017
- What is the median length of homeownership?
- Fox-Neuwirth-Fuks cells, quantum shuffle algebras, and Malle’s conjecture for function fields
- I guess Caffe 608 was in trouble
- Is academia wrong for you?
- Intersectionality as nonlinearity
- The past was bad
March 2017
February 2017
- Tweet, repeat
- Mathematicians becoming data scientists: Should you? How to?
- AB for President
- Braid monodromy and the dual curve
- Mark Metcalf
- Curry apple chicken
- Difference sets missing a Hamming sphere
- Vacuum cleaner on sale
January 2017
2016 71
December 2016
- Robin laid a gun
- Women in math: accountability
- Hast and Matei, “Moments of arithmetic functions in short intervals”
- Reader poll: how many times have you worn a necktie?
- Why did Terrill Thomas die of thirst?
November 2016
- Call for nominations for the Chern Medal
- Double standards in baby names
- How the popular vote matters
- A Man Who Suddenly Fell Over
October 2016
September 2016
- Such shall not become the degradation of Wisconsin
- Kevin Jamieson, hyperparameter optimization, playoffs
- Roger Ailes, man of not many voices
- Are the 2016 Orioles the slowest team in baseball history?
- Show report: Xenia Rubinos at the Frequency
- Orioles 1, Red Sox 0
- Overfriendly balloon
August 2016
- Luke Pebody on sharp bounds for tri-colored sum-free sets
- Roasted balsamic brussels sprouts
- Arithmetic progression joke
- The Wisconsin Supreme Court gets home rule wrong and right
- I got a message for you
- “On l-torsion in class groups of number fields” (with L. Pierce, M.M. Wood)
July 2016
June 2016
May 2016
- Sumsets and sumsets of subsets
- Bounds for cap sets
- Croot-Lev-Pach on AP-free sets in (Z/4Z)^n
- Songs: Ramrao Parsatwar, EEK, Dick Diver
- Bourgain, Gamburd, Sarnak on Markoff triples
- Lmfdb
- Quasi-Moldavian roasted fingerling salad
- Smectic crystals, fingerprints, Klein bottles
April 2016
March 2016
- Dissecting squares into equal-area triangles: idle questions
- Bugbiter
- Math bracket 2016
- Those who leave and those who stay
- New SIAM journal on applied algebra
- Home rule in Wisconsin: the or and the and
February 2016
- Ferrante and juxtaposition
- Voices from Chernobyl
- Clearly, evidently, unambiguously
- Metric chromatic numbers and Lovasz numbers
- Coloring graphs with polynomials
- Counting acyclic orientations with topology
- Metric chromatic numbers
- Is a search a search?
- Midwestern deli heresy
- Antonin Scalia thought jurisprudence was more like math than it really is
- The furniture sentiment
- The Story of a New Name
January 2016
2015 77
December 2015
November 2015
- Obscure novels that are great
- Imagine 33 percent
- Lipnowski-Tsimerman: How large is A_g(F_p)?
- Leibniz on music
- Bobrowski-Kahle-Skraba on the null hypothesis in persistent homology
- Going Out of Business
- Farting princess
- Patience and maturity
October 2015
- The greatest Royal/Met
- A free writing tip, or: the extraordinary m*****f*****s who founded this country
- Why does Indianapolis like the Cubs?
- It will not be an easy or a simple task
August 2015
- Anthony Trollope’s preternatural power
- Personal time
- The Coin Game, II
- The coin game
- Vampire post gets Brooksed
- John Kasich’s blue collar roots
- Pila on a “modular Fermat equation”
- More is less: Ted Olson on Citizens United
- Natural accumulation
- Devil math!
- How to succeed in business without really dying
- “Losers often grow up to be writers”
- Mariners 6, Orioles 5
- August 2015 linkdump
- Configuration spaces of manifolds with flows (with John Wiltshire-Gordon)
July 2015
- The adventures of Terry Tao in the 21st century
- I can’t even tell when I’m on the Internet anymore
- The dime of America
- Dane County Fair: Flippin’
- Rolling the dice on Iran
- The soundness of the Wisconsin Retirement System
- Those other parents
- HNTBW paperback publicity roundup
June 2015
- Alexandra Florea on the average central value of hyperelliptic L-functions
- Sure as roses
- Translator’s notes
May 2015
- Is the evil impulse good?
- Cold Topics Workshop
- William Deresiewicz gets David Foster Wallace now
- I will never find all the bad sentences
- The interpretation of dadbod
April 2015
- Show report: Janeane Garofalo
- Doctoral programs can have a strong influence on the weak-minded
- HNTBW covers: Italy and Brazil
- Quomodocumque
- Why would anyone want to become a security analyst or portfolio manager?
- Should we fire people who pick the wrong Final Four?
March 2015
- David English
- Math Bracket 2015
- Strawberries and Cream
- A boy’s first casserole
- There’s no sick burn like a sick barista burn
- More pie than plate, Dane County edition
- Silence: an experiment
- Michael Harris on Elster on Montaigne on Diagoras on Abraham Wald
- Idle question: are Kakeya sets winning?
February 2015
- Erotische Flugblaetter
- Rachel Kushner (w/ comma poll)
- Are UW-Madison professors underpaid?
- Shin-Strenner: Pseudo-Anosov mapping classes not arising from Penner’s construction
- Ordinary business expense
- Bad lesson
January 2015
2014 112
December 2014
- The turd and the bean, or: the strange life of male nerddom under patriarchy
- How many rational distances can there be between N points in the plane?
- More Disney
- Trader Joe’s is the Disney World of grocery stores
- How many points does a random curve over F_q have?
- What’s so great about JetBlue?
- Loudly and bravely
- So you think you can shop
November 2014
- Drowned out
- Let us now praise Delta Airlines
- Wisconsin is not a blue state
- Bumgarner 2014, Ortiz 2013, and the World Series OVP
October 2014
- Why I’m voting no on the Wisconsin transportation referendum
- 1. Produce defective cars 2. ? 3. Double profit!
- Silas Johnson on weighted discriminants with mass formulas
- Is the two-Burke ballot the new butterfly ballot?
- Francis Galton could be kind of a jerk
- Poem for the ALDS
September 2014
August 2014
- The 1979 Houston Astros hit only 49 home runs
- Benson Farb’s ICM talk
- Boyhood: one more note
- Breuillard’s ICM talk: uniform expansion, Lehmer’s conjecture, tauhat
- Notes on Boyhood
- August linkdump
- Plagiarism, patchwriting, Perlstein
- Quomodocumque
- Grothendieck’s parents
- Where are people buying How Not To Be Wrong?
- Bounded rank was probable in 1950
- Show your work
- “Like a girl”
July 2014
- R.E.M. live at the Rockpalast, 2 Oct 1985
- Rank 2 versus rank 3
- Subnostalgia
- Cool song, bro
- How do you share your New York Times?
- Notes on Gone Girl
- Are ranks bounded?
- The Amanda Palmer TED talk
- Thoughts on TEDx
- HNTBW Publicity Roundup 5
- Hey, what’s that book you’re not reading?
- I hate bad buts and I cannot lie
June 2014
- Many Words, by Little Red Wolf
- Mathematical progress, artistic progress, local-to-global
- Elliott Bay and TGK
- Food I ate
- HNTBW Publicity Roundup 4
- Sympathy for Scott Walker
- People I saw
- Quarreling with Cato
- Bestseller
- HNTBW publicity roundup 3
- There is hope for our country
- HNTBW publicity roundup 2
- HNTBW publicity roundup
May 2014
- Should Andrew Gelman have stayed a math major?
- In which I talk burritos with Nate Silver
- Reader survey: how do you say “asked”?
- Book tour!
- Orioles 7, Brewers 6
- Taking it seriously
- Why is Tommy Hunter so freaking hard to watch?
- Robert Lopez has range
- Amie Wilkinson’s commencement speech
- Almost human intelligence
- Recording the audiobook
- Amit Singer on 3d reconstruction
- Boyer: curves with real multiplication over subcyclotomic fields
April 2014
- What a coincidence, I specialize in contemporary research!
- How Not To Be Wrong Table of Contents
- Why aren’t math professors sociopaths?
- Publishers Weekly on HNTBW
- Reader survey: in what small way are you weird?
- OKCathy
- 1,000,000
- Meeting myself at 17
- Guilt pangs
- Booklist and Kirkus on How Not To Be Wrong
- Jordan and the Dream of Rogen
- Math blog roundup
- Puzzle: low-height points in general position
- Life, friends, was boring. xkcd says so.
March 2014
- Yakov Sinai wins the Abel Prize
- Math Bracket 2014
- Rescinding an offer when the candidate tries to negotiate
- We are all Brian Conrad now
- Scientists aren’t experts on what makes jokes funny
- New How Not To Be Wrong web presence
February 2014
- Yes, newspapers, you need us!
- Land of Milk and Honey and Hummus and Beet Ballerinas
- Why does United want to charge me $800 for premier status?
- Loved and reviled
- The way I am now
- Boris Grebenshikov
- Good student bad student good professor bad professor
January 2014
- Ask Uncle Quo: should I change my name when I get married?
- Galley!
- Apparatchiks
- The trouble with billionaires
- The existence of designs
- Bertrand Russell was emo
- Yossef Zisman, 1832-1925
- Babies, Alinea, cigarettes
- Czerwone Gitary, the Polish Beatles
- Selfie from the polar vortex
- What do Aner Shalev and Nike Vatsal have in common?
2013 161
December 2013
- Proof school: it’s not just for math kids anymore
- Israel Story / Sipur Yisraeli
- Stoner
- An incidence conjecture of Bourgain over fields of positive characteristic (with Hablicsek)
- Names and words
November 2013
- “Homological stability for Hurwitz spaces… II” temporarily withdrawn
- Is online education good or bad for equality?
- Sebastian Thrun, MOOC skeptic
- My other daughter is a girl
- Random simplicial complexes
October 2013
- True love and baseball
- Equidistribution with moving targets
- The other Cal
- “The global warming crowd has a problem”
- Two views on peer review
- This is not my beautiful pi
- Gladwell, Chabris, and the responsibilities of the science writer
- Wisconsin and the Common Core math standards
- Words that appear exactly 25 times in How Not To Be Wrong
- Is the modern high school a wretched hive of scum and villainy?
- I now understand one thing about type theory
- Novel World Series matchups
- Is the Wild Card game a playoff game?
September 2013
- Seether is neither big nor small
- Janet Malcolm and the Eileen Fisher sweater
- Sorry, I already submitted to the Journal of Surjections
- Abraham Wald and the volume of the 4-simplex
- September linkdump
- Adam Smith on mathematicians and poets
- PC run amok
- We get math kids
- On the other hand, there are schools just for music kids
- Ought there be a school just for math kids?
- Jews, intermarriage, and the love that is actually quite comfortable speaking its name
- What kinds of theorems can we fingerprint?
- Gross, Hacking, Keel on the geometry of cluster algebras
- My grandfather, Julius Ellenberg
- Learn to be a crappy programmer
- All the unreleased Prickly songs I have
- “Why don’t books come with e-books?” revisited
- I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a smørrebrød today
August 2013
- Incarceration rates have gone up really, really fast
- Jenny Wilson on FI-modules beyond type A
- Broadcasting on all channels
- Thoughts on Today
- F*** yeah belly lox
- Quomodocumque goes old-media
- Baseball players and Brooklyn hipsters
- Shende and Tsimerman on equidistribution in Bun_2(P^1)
- Mathematics is not terribly individual
- Statistical chutzpah in the Indiana school grade-changing scandal
- How much is the stacks project graph like a random graph?
July 2013
- Who is the British Mark Twain?
- RIP Drungo Larue Hazewood
- The 2-adic stochastic sandpile
- The stochastic sandpile
- Things I don’t know how to do: orient myself in space
- How Not To Be Wrong, first draft
- A brief note on the quantified self
- The American universities that sent representatives to the 1900 ICM in Paris
June 2013
- Sans comment
- Scalia was right
- Why is the California state legislature so polarized?
- It made all the sense in the world
- The greatest danger which today confronts the white race
- Blaise Pascal: also emo
- Tweendom approaches
- What I looked like when I was 17 and talking about math
- Persiflage on Scholze
- Interview with DeMarco and Wilkinson
- AB notes June 2013
- Is philosophy worse for women than math is?
May 2013
- In which I have a quarter-million friends of friends on Facebook
- Natural logs and products of no primes
- Yitang Zhang, bounded gaps, primes as random numbers
- 10,000 baby names of Harvard
- Dinner theater at EL Ideas
- Tantalisingly close to significance
- Elliptic curves with isomorphic cyclic 13-subgroups?
- The dream of professional ultimate is alive in Madison
- BF Skinner was emo
- The fellowship of men whose household purchasing decisions are driven by their preschool-age daughters
April 2013
- Every Noise At Once
- Robert Frost to BF Skinner, 1926
- So I guess Carl Rogers is the Hulk in this scenario
- Random squarefree polynomials and random permutations and slightly non-random permutations
- The best breakfast sandwich in Madison is the Breakfast Ricardo at Cafe Cortadito
- 7 Apr 2013: Twins 4, Orioles 3
- Imagery
- Dan Sharfstein wins Guggenheim
- E.O. Wilson does not think math is unnecessary
- Encouraging!
- The Lonely Passion of Joey Heatherton
- Hiring at and from Wisconsin
- Mean beef stroganoff
- Orioles pre-mortem 2013
March 2013
- Madison pastrami report, sadly brief
- Math on Trial, by Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez
- Non-conjugate matrices that are conjugate
- Math bracket 2013
- There are no new gags
- Hang Xue, genus 4 curves, “Franchetta in bounded degree”
- Social media benchmark
- The helicopter was invented a long time ago
- More transitivity
- Anti-TED
- What is it like to be a vampire and/or parent?
- On Thermonuclear War
- Men have it all
- The Magic Circle, by Jenny Davidson
- Voros McCracken is a wise, wise man
- Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday!
- Chazen 1934
- Happy Birthday, Robyn Hitchcock
- Bring back Olympic tug of war
- Even Ian nods
- Writing seminar in mathematics
February 2013
- Salience, purchasing behavior, Franklin Bruno
- Olive oil and nuts beat a low-fat diet that’s not low-fat
- The world language is coming
- How we look to religion professors
- Who does Public Polling Policy think is challenging Scott Walker?
- Wisconsin puts the MOO in MOOC
- Cultural non-transitivity
- Yes, scientists should write about science
- Why “I don’t know” doesn’t read as macho
- The life and opinions of a college class
- Mabuhay is worth a try
- Is cultural anthropology in an intellectual black hole?
- The irrevocable change brought about by the Civil War
- Barry Mazur wins the National Medal of Science
- More on the end of history: what is a rational prediction?
- Booklist 2012
- Superstrong approximation for monodromy groups (and Galois groups?)
January 2013
- Kato’s lecture notes are like a modernist novel about commutative algebra
- Singapore Math
- Y. Zhao and the Roberts conjecture over function fields
- 1000
- This Week’s Finds In Number Theory
- In which I am on Twitter (and so is Manny Machado)
- Sometimes, sometimes and always
- Gromov: why we don’t explain things
- Stable cohomology for Hurwitz spaces: Upgoer Five version
- The steroid era is over but nobody told the hitters
- How many times can dating die?
- Graph search skepticism
- Is anybody still editing Basic Books?
- Idle question: cluster algebras over finite fields and spectral gaps
- Slides from my JMM talk, “How to Count With Topology”
- Blogging as competitive eating
- Idle questions: Diophantine approximation and complex dynamics
- Is the replicability crisis overblown?
- I know “All About”…
- Do we really underestimate how much we’ll change? (or: absolute value is not linear!)
- Framing the jobs report
- Althouse on Gatsby
- With all due respect
- Lobster Will Tear Us Apart
- Reader survey: what do you look for in a WordPress theme?
- Man’s search for meaning
- Marianne Moore, the baseball fan
2012 156
December 2012
- On the other hand, up yours, AT&T
- Let us now praise American Airlines
- Guest post: Stephanie Tai on deference to experts
- Harvard Class of 1906, P-S
- Save a lot of day
- Homological Stability for Hurwitz spaces and the Cohen-Lenstra conjecture over function fields, II
- Distrusters of experts all around
- In defense of Nate Silver and experts
- Baseball’s triumph in Japan
- Beef Rendang
- Startup culture, VC culture, and Mazurblogging
- I will have funny shoes and I will walk in them
- Most tech writers are single but most phone buyers aren’t
- Ten-second tragedy
- Stephen Landsburg is right about numbers
- A sum-product theorem in function fields (Bloom, Jones)
- Work hard, play hard
- Jane Yeh, On Ninjas
- The Harvard Class of 1906
November 2012
- Star-spangled syntax
- Is anybody still editing the New York Times?
- 18% of Americans think Barack Obama is Jewish
- Triple negative
- When he finds out about regexps he’s going to totally freak
- The GOP’s electoral triumph
- Make no mistake
- Walker and Obama
- Will Mitt Romney be the next Al Gore?
October 2012
- If you can’t say anything intelligent about probability, don’t say anything at all
- Historical textbook collection
- The politics of pronunciation
- The NSF should fund conference daycare
- FI-modules over Noetherian rings
- “They’ve been there before”
- The last Orioles postseason game
- Grothendieck-Winnicott update
September 2012
- Nate Silver is the Kurt Cobain of statistics
- Me and Adam Phillips, Friday 29 Sep, 11:30am
- Song of the night: “All The Time,” by the Cloud Nothings
- Evolving standards of decency
- Somewhere a dog barked
- John Doyle on handwaving and universal laws
- Tea, 4-2!
- Some of my best friends are cross-dressing kingmakers
- Obama 5, Romney 3 in the 7th
- John Darnielle on death metal
- Brewers report
- There is no such Albanian as Jiri Kajane
- Trireview in the Wall Street Journal
- Mochizuki on ABC
August 2012
- Jonah Lehrer, Niall Ferguson, the lecture economy
- My Thurston memory
- Why are the Orioles performing over their Pythagorean record?
- I go in bars
- Paul Ryan, science, money, television
- Why not again?
- Although of course you end up becoming yourself
- Modulo
- August math linkdump
- More arguments about the Orioles and regression
- What the ’80s looked like
- Lucky wins count
- The half-life of Alanis Morissette
- Corn and sweet potato chowder
- Gigantic pensions are rare
- David Mumford says we should replace plane geometry with programming and I’m not sure he’s wrong
- Ladies and gentlemen of the Bronx I give you Miguel Gonzalez and Chris Tillman
July 2012
- The much-deserved death of the perfect 10
- Nobody likes us
- Humanities Hackathon
- Torsion in the homology of arithmetic groups, and an Iwasawa algebra puzzle
- The map of adjectives
- Guess the state by its popular names
- There were anti-vaccination activists in 1736
- Higgs
- Clock radios are well-designed
June 2012
- I thought the truth was apt to be simple
- Ockham’s Razor Conference
- Roasted potato salad (Greekish)
- Simon: The Genius in my Basement
- It’s a recall, not an omen
May 2012
- Why Walker is winning
- Lev Grossman — they asked him anything
- Knuth, big-O calculus, implicit definitions (difficulty of)
- John Stuart Mill and scansion
- RIP Paul Fussell
- David Brooks and impossible lifestyles
- Should Harvard offer a “good enough, but no room” certificate?
- How to compute arctangent if you live in the 18th century
- The Scarlet Plague
- Why not?
- Coin frequencies, in my salad bowl and through American history
- The first paragraph of Illywhacker, by Peter Carey
- FI-modules and representation stability, III
April 2012
- FI-modules and representation stability, II
- FI-modules and representation stability, I
- The Orioles have allowed 35% of their runs this year in the 6th inning
- Reader survey: Have you advised — could you advise? a Ph.D. student online? Or have you been so advised?
- Online education and creative writing workshops
- Several attacks on the previous post
- What, if anything, is the future of the university?
- A story about Giorgio Benda
- Wisconsin hires 2012
- Cheap non-standard analysis and expressions of certainty
- Orioles 10, White Sox 4: the secret life of Arrieta
- Legion of Supermayors
- Should confidence intervals take interpoll variation into account?
- Innovation, Febreze, arm-slashing
- Charles Franklin on “Data Visualization in Political Science,” Wednesday at Union South
- Elsevier boycott in the Notices
- More on probability aggregation and De Finetti
- Experts agree — Meese is a pig
March 2012
- Orioles pre-mortem 2012
- Tufts made me a nice poster
- In which I am sentimental about diagramming sentences
- John Lackey stands up for himself
- Do required math courses increase your earnings?
- Gluten-free for lent
- Roch on phylogenetic trees, learning ultrametrics from noisy measurements, and the shrimp-dog
- 17th-century patent trolling
- Should we have a Reckoner General?
- WSJ review of In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman
- In like a linkdump
- Z is for zero to go
February 2012
- Reader survey: do you cut, butt, or budge in line?
- Raw polling data as playground
- Show report: Fatty Acids and Sat Nite Duets
- Sat. Nite Duets at the Rathskeller tonight
- America has spoken: Wisconsin is better than Minnesota or Illinois
- The S&P 500 and the Dow Jones
- Why aren’t there people named Cobbler?
- Hwang and To on injectivity radius and gonality, and “Typical curves are not typical.”
- The hardest Rush Hour position
- Elsevier’s sorry defense of the Research Works Act
- Sleng teng riddim
- Bayesian Linference
- Is there a noncommutative Siegel’s Lemma?
- Would the death of the journal system be good for women in math?
- Blackboard panorama
- Statement on the Elsevier boycott
- Is the time right for bundling?
- Why don’t books come with e-books?
- Pumpkin Belly, by Tenor Saw
January 2012
- Oh, drubbles
- No good news for Wisconsin Democrats in the first Marquette Law Poll
- Malcolm, by James Purdy
- Long on Romney
- Is commercial writing more honest than academia?
- Graham Burnett wrote a very big book about whales
- Tukey before he was Tukey
- Was Russian election turnout too non-Gaussian to be real?
- Emotional Equations
- Random Dieudonne modules, random p-divisible groups, and random curves over finite fields
- Intrigue in the Harvard personals
- Bovine fraternal skin graft
- Gaileo, Schrodinger, countability, and the golden age of newspaper math
2011 162
December 2011
- Paul Krugman likes math but sells it short
- Four Tucson notes
- Movies I cried at in 2011
- Reader survey: do you know your credit card number by heart?
- Are Wisconsin Democrats blowing the recalls?
- David Foster Wallace was not famously depressive
- The experts list, or: how can a journalist find out how to compute pi to high precision?
- “Kakeya sets over non-archimedean local rings,” by Dummit and Hablicsek
- We are the 81%
- Best Writing on Mathematics 2011, and Nathanson on massive collaboration
- Dead people are not numerators
- The Big Short: two linguistic notes
- The Tate Conjecture and finiteness of K3 surfaces and the Tate conjecture
- The conformal modulus of a mapping class
- Set is not the only version of Set
November 2011
- Jay Michaelson on God vs. Gay, Dec 1
- Why do people think government workers are stupid?
- The Arrow-Debreu model wishes you a happy Thanksgiving
- Math Girls
- Miscellaneous linkdump Nov 11
- Are math departments better at recruitment than elite financial firms?
- Scott Walker: not toast
- Gonality, the Bogomolov property, and Habegger’s theorem on Q(E^tors)
- Help me be a great Nim teacher
- R.E.M. and Cal Ripken
- Where is the deadwood in the K-12 math curriculum?
- David Foster Wallace did not write Catcher in the Rye
- The quotable Alfie Kohn
- What If… Wisconsin were Ohio?
- What If….. The Bangles had recorded “Balloon Man?”
- Music Hack Day
- Math linkdump Nov 11
October 2011
- The Curse of Arthur Rhodes
- Cathy O’Neil is killing it
- Applied Algebra Days this weekend in Madison
- I say two sentences about the World Series on NPR
- CJ asks the hard questions about The Wizard of Oz
- In which Google+ is a good place to talk about math
- Show report: Man Man, High Noon, 18 Oct 2011
- Stephen Pinker is a member of the intellectual elite
- Why not data science?
- Division of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences
- What I learned from Zhiwei Yun about Hilbert schemes
- Is Arrow’s Theorem interesting?
- Put the second law of thermodynamics down and slowly step away, New York Times
- It’s like a state, a state of Kong
- Subjective probabilities: point/counterpoint
- In which it seems elementary school is much as I remember it
September 2011
- Roger Brown and the Chicago Imagists at Madison MOCA
- Were the Orioles the most improved team in baseball?
- Should science journalists check copy with their sources?
- Arg max
- 98% sounds like it means “almost all” but it doesn’t always
- Happy Jim Traber Day
- Meaningful September baseball in Baltimore
- New York City passes on B-cycle
- Explain to me why I should use Madison’s new bike-sharing program
- I think I just saw a live-action political cartoon about the state of American liberalism in 2011
- Homology of the Torelli group and negative-dimensional vector spaces
- Gitto Tortillas at the Dane County Farmer’s Market
- The There Was a Mans
August 2011
- The Orioles are all about pitching consistency
- The median integer sequence
- Holden Karnovsky on the perils of expected utility
- Should the AMS have a Fellowship program?
- Arithmetic Veech sublattices of SL_2(Z)
- “Cremona Tables” for elliptic curves over Q(sqrt(5)), by William Stein and his REU
- _________ Dave?
- Sat. Nite Duets on CNN
- Breeders exegesis
- There’s no 4-branched Belyi’s theorem — right?
- Oliver and Olivia
- Absentee ballot non-hijinx in the Wisconsin recalls
- Imraan Coovadia on South African fiction
- Bourqui on spaces of rational curves and motivic Batyrev-Manin
- Beef apple, cumin crouton
July 2011
- We ask America and America tells us something unreasonably precise
- Madison in the ’60s: reactionary politics and opposition to racial equality
- Prickly live on WMBR, 1995 and 1997
- John Tierney can have my rubberized playground surface when he pries it from my cold, dead hands
- Math is like Earthball, not like ARML
- Should you be surprised by the diameter of the nxnxn Rubik’s group?
- Sports dude dialectic
- In which I agree with Pushkin
- But he ate the banana with such authenticity
- Cosma Shalizi 1, game theory 0
- Cathy O’Neil blogs at Mathbabe
June 2011
- How bad is Nick Markakis? b/w Mallards misc.
- Poonen-Rains and lines on a quadric surface
- Thoughts on Dan Sharfstein’s “The Invisible Line”
- To say nothing of Gary Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine
- Es apulkat (avocado coffee shake) at Calasan Diner
- Poonen-Rains, Selmer groups, random maximal isotropics, random orthogonal matrices
- Statistics, Politics, and Policy
- Aggregating degrees of belief: a puzzle
- “Three things”: Ravi Vakil on how to listen to a math talk
- Does New Mexico’s governor have a Wisconsin veto?
- What experimental math taught me about my intuition
May 2011
- Franzen blows a joke
- Philosophy is about craziness
- How good is Zach Britton?
- Maples on Cohen-Lenstra for matrices with iid entries
- Future “women in math” threads: a request
- You must not act surprised when I inform you that dysfunctional relationship is a product of today
- Why Laba is not on Math Overflow
- Stop me before I evoke again!
- Reader survey: have you ever clicked on a Facebook ad?
- Recall petition hijinx
- Two CAREER awards at Wisconsin
April 2011
- Can the trace hear the shape of its field?
- Angry Birds is less popular than television
- Is Zipcar offering too little insurance?
- Living in the past
- Living in the future
- Stephen Burt interviewed in Publishers Weekly
- Close election? Flip for it
- It matters little whether we progress with understanding the diophantine approximation
- Under the bridge
- Two more maps of Wisconsin
- Rick Ungar makes too much of Kloppenburg-Prosser
- Thus endeth my career as political prognosticator
- Austin Grossman’s new novels: soon they will be available
March 2011
- It’s Grothenday!
- Kloppenburg, Soglin, Cieslewicz
- How the Hippies Saved Physics: David Kaiser visits UW April 1
- And the Drungo Larue Hazewood Award for the year’s best sports name goes to
- Surely the greatest rhetorical question ever delivered in a political debate
- Wisconsin hires for 2011
- Two algebraic number theorists in search of a square dance
- Condorcet on French mathematics as underdog
- I talk about Pi Day on Wisconsin Public Radio
- Martinus
- At least he didn’t say it was a quantum leap
- Condorcet was an interesting dude
- Wisconsin faculty blogs
February 2011
- My piece in Atlantic Online about Scott Walker and the partial veto
- Cohen-Lenstra as categorification
- Active clustering
- Admired sentences
- My favorite Wisconsin labor tweet
- In which John Tierney annoys me regarding women in science, part — wait, I’ve lost count
- Four things people mostly aren’t saying about the Wisconsin collective bargaining protests
- Dan Sharfstein, “The Invisible Line”
- Are the Orioles the most improved team in baseball?
- In which I stop by NYU and get categorified by Kazhdan
- Richard Stanley reveals what’s under the turtle
- Men: bad at anthropology?
- Snowdecahedron
January 2011
- Gendered conference campaign
- Compressed sensing, compressed MDS, compressed clustering, and my talk tomorrow
- Gowers & co. on the cap set problem
- Styxocracy
- I do like the Beatles! I do!
- A primer on mapping class groups
- Revenge of the intersentence double space
- Miscellaneous awesome
- Do mathematicians have “tiger mothers”? or: that’s funny, Norbert, you don’t look Chinese!
- JMM, Golsefidy, Silverman, Scanlon
- The Google puzzle and the perils of averaging ratios
- Always eat at restaurants with Cochon in the name
- Chomsky’s trace theory, Home Depot, wanna contraction, Semisonic
- Narcissistic personality disorder, the NRC rankings, and finite metric spaces in Slate
2010 136
December 2010
- Reader survey: how seriously do you take expected utility?
- 2010 booklist
- Weird NYT walkback on the Hauser case
- December linkdump
- Ngrams: one more way to win an argument using Google
- The initial “Why”
- Split-screen blackboard
- In which there are no more mountains left to conquer
- Licensing changes at the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
- Ankylosaurus, on the other hand, was totally in earnest
November 2010
- Why SMB is no longer with the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics
- Quomodocunquizing
- In which I am impressed by Biddy Martin’s political savvy
- Modeling lambda-invariants by p-adic random matrices
- Why was 6 afraid of 7?
- How to ruin your Thanksgiving
- The space of unknots and the space of unknotted ropes
- Cabbage apples mustard, cheese strawberries pineapples
- What does Republican state government mean for the University of Wisconsin?
- How many people will vote on Facebook?
- Renteria’s place in history
October 2010
- Reader survey: writers and their baseball teams (also Joan Jett)
- Facts about Kyoto
- Non-ridiculous things that sound ridiculous
- Mike Appelstein, Moe Tucker, and the Tea Party
- Orioles predictions revisited
- October 2010 linkdump
- Partha Niyogi has died
- David Lynch/parenting protip
September 2010
- We’re number 6 through 15!
- Proofiness
- Wisconsin 49, Austin Peay 3 — at the half!
- Son, I’m glad we had this talk
- Tips for giving talks
- Framing
- Sara Marcus and Danica McKellar
- Reader survey: how many non-drivers in Madison?
- Cheesesteak eggrolls
- A Supposedly Shining Thing
- Expander graphs, gonality, and variation of Galois representations
August 2010
- Iranian election statistics — never mind the digits?
- Counting Canadians
- In which I make oblique reference to a change in my personal circumstances
- Math busking
- Moleeds
- California prayer agency, Earth-2 Lawrence v. Texas
- Gay marriage and the null hypothesis
- Turkey burgers, gazpacho, Paul Robeson
- Show report: New Pornographers at the Orpheum
- Illusie’s reminiscences of Grothendieck
- De-mystify me about nonstandard finite fields
- A useful slogan from Steve Martin
July 2010
- Fill up my cup. Mazel Tov.
- Canonical
- The different does not have a canonical square root
- Green eggs
- Duel at Dawn
- Bhargava and Satriano on Galois closures of rings
- I am cranky about people who are cranky about the tenure system
- Nick Markakis is the new Mark Grudzielanek
- Pizzayola
- Up yours, Cook’s Illustrated
- In which Ian Gurfield is a mad genius
- Two now-irrelevant ethical questions in sports
- Consumer advisory
- Prediction
- Lemon coconut Italian soda
- The capacity to be alone
- July math link dump
- In which I publish my first paper
- Real life rock top 10
June 2010
- Thank God for Pittsburgh
- Men in science
- In which John Tierney continues to annoy me: featuring reader survey!
- Adverb placement and probability
- My name is Cesar Izturis and I’m slugging .244
- In which I try to find a way to follow the Orioles without crying
- Happy birthday, Dick Gross
- What if political scientists covered the news?
- Coulis fail
- Reader survey: what open question would you ask Dick Gross?
May 2010
- How to find a syphilitic with the Lambert W-function and Fibonacci numbers
- The Challenger disaster was not caused by Russian roulette
- Robert Siegel said my name
- 2010 food cart update
- Post-colonial agriculture
- Prosecutor’s fallacy — now with less fallaciousness!
- Rush Hour, Jr.
- The Ask, “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” fudge
- If I Had a Hifi
- Motivic puzzle: the moduli space of squarefree polynomials
- In re pigeons, Mr. Darwin is immense
- Imaginary Architecture
- Zlatos a Badger
- Reader survey: what are the unwritten laws of hiring in math?
- An unsettling image from Mifflin
- The census will be wrong. We could fix it.
April 2010
- What would the proposed immigration reform law mean for mathematics?
- Quaker Steak and Lube
- The case of XXXXXX XXXXXX
- Pseudo-Anosov puzzle 2: homology rank and dilatation
- Pseudo-Anosovs with low dilatation: Farb-Leininger-Margalit, and a puzzle
- Quantifying Orioles late-game dispirit
- Sleepytime Gorilla Museum: Origin Story
- “The rest of the world was uncertain what had been proven and what not.”
- McMullen on dilatation in finite covers
- New faculty at Wisconsin
- Orioles 2010 pre-mortem
- That garment which is supposed to denote virile command
March 2010
- Author photos
- Misleading signage, Hempstead, TX, 28 Mar 2010
- Fritz Grunewald, RIP
- Pinch run, grand slam
- Earth-M bracketology
- In which Tucson, AZ is the miniature golf capital of these United States
- Kids aw hawd to ustan
- Recommendation inflation
- March math link dump
- Distinguished lectures this week: Gunnar Carlsson on persistent homology
February 2010
- Pinoy Twee
- Compressed sensing in Wired
- The postdocs crawl in, the postdocs crawl out
- Hired 2
- Wisconsin math conquers Britain
- Irrational likred
- Irrational hatred and the Super Bowl
- Getting that A, by means fair and foul
January 2010
- Hain-Matsumoto, “Galois actions on fundamental groups of curves…”
- The Chess Master and the Computer
- Two great tastes that taste great together
- George Saunders, “The Bohemians”
- Deforming Galois representations in Rwanda
- 2009 book list
- What do roots of random polynomials look like?
- A true-false quiz for the world
- Reader survey: do you double-space after a period?
2009 168
December 2009
- Lamb and black truffle sausage: Osteria Papavero, you crazy bastard, I love you
- In which I improve on Sting
- The best math joke that will appear in a major Hollywood picture this year
- Square pegs, square pegs. Square, square pegs.
- Madison pizza round-up
- Menopause Matters
- RIP Miles “Teddywedger” Allen
- Evan Baden: The Illuminati, at Wisconsin Union
- The Year in Mathematical Ideas
- Homological stability for Hurwitz spaces and the Cohen-Lenstra conjecture over function fields
- The braid group, analytic number theory, and Weil’s three columns
- Fried blog
- Fried blogs!
- On your radio
November 2009
- Airport barbecue
- Local points on quadratic twists of X_0(N)
- well, did we, okay did we determine that Moebius maps were like isometries or whatever?
- Cinnamon garlic eggs
- Mihailescu on the Leopoldt conjecture
- Things I now know how to do: signal apology from inside a car
- Disks in a box, update
- What to do in talks
- What not to do in talks
- In which Athens, GA is great
- You know, AND THE LIKE!
- Mountain Goats have sold out the High Noon
- Diaconis: From Magic to Mathematics and Back
October 2009
- Random pro-p groups, braid groups, and random tame Galois groups
- Math And: Arielle Saiber on Italian poetry and Italian algebra, Friday, Oct 23 at 4pm
- Two good things I ate this week
- Modern game
- Brothers
- Why Math Overflow works, and why it might not
- Anabelian puzzle 5: isogenies between Jacobians and metabelian fundamental groups
- Road trip!
- Sex advice from mathematicians
- How it was with tobacco
- The total variation of win probability, or: THE MAGNIFICENT TWINS-TIGERS GAME
- The man whose salary was O(log log X)
- Food cart versus food cart as a hungry city holds its breath
- Warning signs of a possible collapse of contemporary mathematics
September 2009
- How bad are the Orioles, really?
- Things I don’t know how to do, IV: signal apology from inside a car
- Strategic Vision done in by the digits?
- Show report: Micachu, Chairlift
- Thursday is your last chance to see Anvil! The Story of Anvil in Madison
- I’ll Be Your Mirror, by sixty 10-year-olds
- “Every curve is a Teichmuller curve,” or “Why SL_2(Z) has the congruence subgroup property.”
- Sandkings
- Jim Carroll is dead
- Show report: Gomers/Dandys/Breeders
- Do all curves over finite fields have covers with a sqrt(q) eigenvalue?
- Reader survey: nerdy memories
- Back to school linkdump
August 2009
- In which I like a bit of hip-hop vernacular as much as the next man
- Anabelian puzzle 4: What is the probability that a set of n points has no 3 collinear?
- Anabelian puzzle 3: why are there virtual sections?
- Anabelian puzzle 2: birational sections in the least non-abelian case
- Astonishing, logarithmic
- Anabelian puzzle 1: lifting Galois representations from symplectic groups to mapping class groups
- Smarts, luck, wealth
- Paean
- La wei si ji dou, or: eat at Fugu
- Should MathSciNet be a social network?
- Reading: The Magicians, by Lev Grossman
- Things I don’t know how to do, III
- Professor Severi is a JERK!
- In which I attend a conference on fundamental groups in arithmetic geometry from the comfort of my own home
- Pythagorean doldrums
- Prickly: 14 songs
July 2009
- Outback Steakhouse with the alphabetical epicures
- Someone still loves you Meredith Salenger
- “Deforming Galois Representations” is online, too
- Netflix Prize photo finish!
- “Le Groupe Fondamental de la Droite Projective Moins Trois Points” is now online
- Efficient markets and the digits of pi
- Reader survey: do you follow the arXiv?
- White Sox 12, Orioles 8
- One Paragraph of The Dwarf
- Madison Science Pub at Brocach, July 26
- The return of the Man From Tlalnepantla
- Dozivjeti Stotu
- Show report: Fountains of Wayne
- Deals and Steals
- In the Land of Invented Languages
- Positive motivic measures are counting measures
- The Vilna Gaon approximates pi
- Summary judgments, July 2009
June 2009
- Why do commencement speakers lie so much?
- Mathematicians, a coffee table book from Princeton University Press
- “He was dressed in leg warmers. He almost looked like a bum kind of.”
- More Iranian election statistics
- The Orioles have two legitimate Rookie of the Year candidates and neither one of them is named Matt Wieters
- The Z-list
- One paragraph of Oscar and Lucinda
- On the Iranian election returns, in Slate
- Speaking of Emmanuel Kowalski
- Math Midway this Sunday in Washington Square Park
- Diophantineness: Mazur-Rubin and Kollar
- “Is Caffe 608 in trouble?” revisited.
- Reader survey: do you wear a watch?
- Matt Groening likes Gershon Legman, Gershon Legman likes John Sanford
May 2009
- In which Matt Wieters isn’t special
- Koberda on dilatation and finite nilpotent covers
- R.I.P. Kipp’s
- Baseball like it oughta be
- Which teams in the AL East are for real?
- Made me feel like I was Paul Verlaine
- Don DeLillo to David Foster Wallace, on reading math
- The entropy of Frobenius
- We also offer unlimited permutations of side dishes
- In which CJ is goth
- The only argument I have ever won with Colliot-Thelene
- Influenza Body Count
- Bill Foster, D-Physics
- Polarized electorates and McDonald’s salad
- Deeeefense
- MALBEC: Jerry Zhu, Michael Coen, how to say snake in gibbon
- First contact
- My day of eats, Bay Area edition
April 2009
- The Viscount Deligne’s coat of arms
- Lieblich’s counter counterexample example
- Don Henley Must Drive
- More MALBEC: Niyogi on geometry of data, Coen on abstract nonsense
- Turn ahead the clock
- Gehry/Serra
- A little more about random configurations
- Of all the crops, true peace is tops
- In which my friends write things
- Harvard beats Yale 29-29, both beat Princeton
- Hard discs, configuration spaces, kissing spheres, the 15 puzzle
March 2009
- Eat this today — tacos al pastor pizza at Ian’s
- Pastrami fried rice, or: is there Chinese food in Mountain Brook?
- Two estimation questions
- Blogging is good for math, or: Kakeya problems over finite fields
- Major league honkbal
- Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to sports radio
- Two wise men I know
- Newton…. for the ladies
- Netherlands magic, feel it happen!
- 19th century “algorithms”
- Historical math monographs at Cornell
- MALBEC seminar: David Balduzzi, “Measuring consciousness as integrated information”
- I have never listened to an album by
February 2009
- 2666
- Revolution revisited
- She do the police in different voices
- My name is Blossom, I was raised in a lion’s den
- February linkdump
- In which I am away from my desk
- Thurston on proof and progress in mathematics
- Sifting and winnowing
- Laza and Kuznetsov on cubic fourfolds
- Meta meta
January 2009
- That shows nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless
- In which I like Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem
- Claimed proof of the ABC conjecture
- Bilu-Parent update
- By request: notable out-of-town meals of 2008
- Should NSF give more, but smaller, graduate fellowships?
- Tiger
- Why aren’t you eating at Osteria Papavero?
- Blogging my orphans: n points in the plane with no three collinear
- 2008 cities list
- The modal Chinese restaurant
- 2008 book list
- Voronoi diagrams at the Milwaukee Art Museum
- Superintendent’s writing award: a correction