Ordered from the more to less serious…<\/p>\n
Being trivial is our most dreaded pitfall: you say stupid things, not original things, outrageously wrong things – all will be forgotten when the dust settles down. But if you pompously call a+b=c “Theorem” in your paper, you will be forever remembered as “this a+b guy”, no matter you prove bloody good theorems afterwords…
\nI was introduced to the idea on September 1st 1960 at the then Leningrad University when our analysis professor Boris Mikhailovich Makarov said to me after our first calculus class – he expressed this in somewhat metaphorical terms – that I should’ve kept my mouth shut unless I had something non-trivial to say.
\nFurther encouraged by my teachers and fellow students, I tried to follow his advice and, apparently, have succeeded – I hear nothing disrespectful about my mouth for the last 10-20 years. Strangely, this does not make me feel a lot happier.
\n“Trivial” is relative. Anything grasped as long as two minutes ago seems trivial to a working mathematician.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nAnother thought this raises is that I’ve just spent the last 3 years of my life writing something trivial<\/a>…<\/li>\n
- I really like Jordan Ellenberg’s suggestion of Cold Topics Workshops<\/a>.<\/li>\n
- Mathematics makes it into the Guardian with an article about mathematical modeling<\/a>.<\/li>\n
- With the LHC inactive, some LHC physicists have had to spend their time studying plots<\/a> (trigger warning, and NSFW).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Update<\/strong>: One more, far more serious than anything above. Sabine Hossenfelder brings up an important and rarely discussed topic here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ordered from the more to less serious… On the geometric Langlands front, there’s video posted today of this talk by Dennis Gaitsgory. Michael Harris has already commented here about the local geometric Langlands conjecture in terms of 2-categories that Gaitsgory … Continue reading