{"id":8249,"date":"2016-01-21T14:17:12","date_gmt":"2016-01-21T19:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8249"},"modified":"2016-01-21T14:17:12","modified_gmt":"2016-01-21T19:17:12","slug":"back-at-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8249","title":{"rendered":"Back at Work"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a while since the last posting here, mostly because I&#8217;ve been away on vacation, but also because I haven&#8217;t seen anything that newsworthy.  But, since I&#8217;m back in the office and there have been complaints, here are a few items:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>For the first time in a very large number of years, a new volume has appeared in the series of Bourbaki treatises, dealing with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.springer.com\/us\/book\/9783662493601\">algebraic topology<\/a> (table of contents <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bourbaki.ens.fr\/ta14-tdm.pdf\">here<\/a>).  From the table of contents, it appears to be a rather modern treatment mostly of the fundamental group, but still in the Bourbaki style of exhaustive coverage and abstract point of view (I don&#8217;t see any mention there of actually computing the fundamental group of anything&#8230;).<\/li>\n<li>While in Paris I attended some of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bourbaki.ens.fr\/seminaires\/2016\/Prog_janv16.html\">Seminaire Bourbaki talks<\/a>.  You too can watch via Youtube, or read the written versions.<\/li>\n<li>Far from mathematics and physics, one thing I did in Paris was stop by a store selling Breton products, and had a discussion with the owner about Kouign Amanns.  He had a short hand-written list of a few places they could be had in the US.  When I got back here, the next morning I went out to my local bakery (Silver Moon, at Broadway and 105th), and found that while I was away they had started selling them.<\/li>\n<li>On the Mochizuki front, there&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1601.03572\">a new paper by Vesselin Dimitrov<\/a>, claiming that if Mochizuki&#8217;s argument is correct, it implies something even stronger than Mochizuki claims, an effective version of the abc conjecture.   The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.maths.nottingham.ac.uk\/personal\/ibf\/files\/kyoto.iut.html\">next workshop about this<\/a> will be in Kyoto in July.  One mathematician who has gotten interested in this and is listed as planning to attend is Edward Frenkel.<\/li>\n<li>If you can&#8217;t get enough of the &#8220;Is HEP physics dead or what?&#8221; debate, see John Horgan on <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scientificamerican.com\/cross-check\/how-physics-lost-its-fizz\/\">How Physics Lost its Fizz<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Among the things going on here at Columbia this semester, there are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/2016\/01\/14\/spring-2016-samuel-eilenberg-lectures\/\">Eilenberg Lectures on geometric representation theory<\/a> (starting in a few minutes&#8230;) by Roman Bezrukavnikov, a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~harris\/MathG66592016.htm\">course by Michael Harris<\/a> on Lafforgue&#8217;s recent work on the Langlands correspondence for function fields (also the topic of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bourbaki.ens.fr\/TEXTES\/1110.pdf\">one of the Seminaire Bourbaki talks<\/a>), and a <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.google.com\/site\/mcduff2016\/home\">conference celebrating Dusa McDuff&#8217;s 70th birthday<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Better leave now to get a seat at the talk&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a while since the last posting here, mostly because I&#8217;ve been away on vacation, but also because I haven&#8217;t seen anything that newsworthy. But, since I&#8217;m back in the office and there have been complaints, here are a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8249\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8249"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8251,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8249\/revisions\/8251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}