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Just a quick announcement that Dustin Mixon and Aubrey de Grey have just launched the Polymath16 project over at Dustin’s blog.  The main goal of this project is to simplify the recent proof by Aubrey de Grey that the chromatic number of the unit distance graph of the plane is at least 5, thus making progress on the Hadwiger-Nelson problem.  The current proof is computer assisted (in particular it requires one to control the possible 4-colorings of a certain graph with over a thousand vertices), but one of the aims of the project is to reduce the amount of computer assistance needed to verify the proof; already a number of such reductions have been found.  See also this blog post where the polymath project was proposed, as well as the wiki page for the project.  Non-technical discussion of the project will continue at the proposal blog post.

Next quarter (starting Monday, April 2) I will be teaching Math 246C (complex analysis) here at UCLA.  This is the third in a three-series graduate course on complex analysis; a few years ago I taught the first course in this series (246A), so this course can be thought of in some sense as a sequel to that one (and would certainly assume knowledge of the material in that course as a prerequisite), although it also assumes knowledge of material from the second course 246B (which covers such topics as Weierstrass factorization and the theory of harmonic functions).

246C is primarily a topics course, and tends to be a somewhat miscellaneous collection of complex analysis subjects that were not covered in the previous two installments of the series.  The initial topics I have in mind to cover are

• The Riemann-Roch theorem;
• Circle packings;
• The Bieberbach conjecture (proven by de Branges); and
• the Schramm-Loewner equation (SLE).
• This list is however subject to change (it is the first time I will have taught on any of these topics, and I am not yet certain on the most logical way to arrange them; also I am not completely certain that I will be able to cover all the above topics in ten weeks).  I welcome reference recommendations and other suggestions from readers who have taught on one or more of these topics.

As usual, I will be posting lecture notes on this blog as the course progresses.

[Update: Mar 13: removed elliptic functions, as I have just learned that this was already covered in the prior 246B course.]

Alice Guionnet, Assaf Naor, Gilles Pisier, Sorin Popa, Dimitri Shylakhtenko, and I are organising a three month program here at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) on the topic of Quantitative Linear Algebra.  The purpose of this program is to bring together mathematicians and computer scientists (both junior and senior) working in various quantitative aspects of linear operators, particularly in large finite dimension.  Such aspects include, but are not restricted to discrepancy theory, spectral graph theory, random matrices, geometric group theory, ergodic theory, von Neumann algebras, as well as specific research directions such as the Kadison-Singer problem, the Connes embedding conjecture and the Grothendieck inequality.  There will be several workshops and tutorials during the program (for instance I will be giving a series of introductory lectures on random matrix theory).

While we already have several confirmed participants, we are still accepting applications for this program until Dec 4; details of the application process may be found at this page.

In 2010, the UCLA mathematics department launched a scholarship opportunity for entering freshman students with exceptional background and promise in mathematics. We are able to offer one scholarship each year.  The UCLA Math Undergraduate Merit Scholarship provides for full tuition, and a room and board allowance for 4 years, contingent on continued high academic performance. In addition, scholarship recipients follow an individualized accelerated program of study, as determined after consultation with UCLA faculty.   The program of study leads to a Masters degree in Mathematics in four years.

More information and an application form for the scholarship can be found on the web at:

http://www.math.ucla.edu/ugrad/mums

To be considered for Fall 2018, candidates must apply for the scholarship and also for admission to UCLA on or before November 30, 2017.

I am totally stunned to learn that Maryam Mirzakhani died today yesterday, aged 40, after a severe recurrence of the cancer she had been fighting for several years.  I had planned to email her some wishes for a speedy recovery after learning about the relapse yesterday; I still can’t fully believe that she didn’t make it.

My first encounter with Maryam was in 2010, when I was giving some lectures at Stanford – one on Perelman’s proof of the Poincare conjecture, and another on random matrix theory.  I remember a young woman sitting in the front who asked perceptive questions at the end of both talks; it was only afterwards that I learned that it was Mirzakhani.  (I really wish I could remember exactly what the questions were, but I vaguely recall that she managed to put a nice dynamical systems interpretation on both of the topics of my talks.)

After she won the Fields medal in 2014 (as I posted about previously on this blog), we corresponded for a while.  The Fields medal is of course one of the highest honours one can receive in mathematics, and it clearly advances one’s career enormously; but it also comes with a huge initial burst of publicity, a marked increase in the number of responsibilities to the field one is requested to take on, and a strong expectation to serve as a public role model for mathematicians.  As the first female recipient of the medal, and also the first to come from Iran, Maryam was experiencing these pressures to a far greater extent than previous medallists, while also raising a small daughter and fighting off cancer.  I gave her what advice I could on these matters (mostly that it was acceptable – and in fact necessary – to say “no” to the vast majority of requests one receives).

Given all this, it is remarkable how productive she still was mathematically in the last few years.  Perhaps her greatest recent achievement has been her “magic wandtheorem with Alex Eskin, which is basically the analogue of the famous measure classification and orbit closure theorems of Marina Ratner, in the context of moduli spaces instead of unipotent flows on homogeneous spaces.  (I discussed Ratner’s theorems in this previous post.  By an unhappy coincidence, Ratner also passed away this month, aged 78.)  Ratner’s theorems are fundamentally important to any problem to which a homogeneous dynamical system can be associated (for instance, a special case of that theorem shows up in my work with Ben Green and Tamar Ziegler on the inverse conjecture for the Gowers norms, and on linear equations in primes), as it gives a good description of the equidistribution of any orbit of that system (if it is unipotently generated); and it seems the Eskin-Mirzakhani result will play a similar role in problems associated instead to moduli spaces.  The remarkable proof of this result – which now stands at over 200 pages, after three years of revision and updating – uses almost all of the latest techniques that had been developed for homogeneous dynamics, and ingeniously adapts them to the more difficult setting of moduli spaces, in a manner that had not been dreamed of being possible only a few years earlier.

Maryam was an amazing mathematician and also a wonderful and humble human being, who was at the peak of her powers.  Today was a huge loss for Maryam’s family and friends, as well as for mathematics.

[EDIT, Jul 16: New York times obituary here.]

[EDIT, Jul 18: New Yorker memorial here.]

A few days ago, I was talking with Ed Dunne, who is currently the Executive Editor of Mathematical Reviews (and in particular with its online incarnation at MathSciNet).  At the time, I was mentioning how laborious it was for me to create a BibTeX file for dozens of references by using MathSciNet to locate each reference separately, and to export each one to BibTeX format.  He then informed me that underneath to every MathSciNet reference there was a little link to add the reference to a Clipboard, and then one could export the entire Clipboard at once to whatever format one wished.  In retrospect, this was a functionality of the site that had always been visible, but I had never bothered to explore it, and now I can populate a BibTeX file much more quickly.

This made me realise that perhaps there are many other useful features of popular mathematical tools out there that only a few users actually know about, so I wanted to create a blog post to encourage readers to post their own favorite tools, or features of tools, that are out there, often in plain sight, but not always widely known.  Here are a few that I was able to recall from my own workflow (though for some of them it took quite a while to consciously remember, since I have been so used to them for so long!):

1. TeX for Gmail.  A Chrome plugin that lets one write TeX symbols in emails sent through Gmail (by writing the LaTeX code and pressing a hotkey, usually F8).
2. Boomerang for Gmail.  Another Chrome plugin for Gmail, which does two main things.  Firstly, it can “boomerang” away an email from your inbox to return at some specified later date (e.g. one week from today).  I found this useful to declutter my inbox regarding mail that I needed to act on in the future, but was unable to deal with at present due to travel, or because I was waiting for some other piece of data to arrive first.   Secondly, it can send out email with some specified delay (e.g. by tomorrow morning), giving one time to cancel the email if necessary.  (Thanks to Julia Wolf for telling me about Boomerang!)
3. Which just reminds me, the Undo Send feature on Gmail has saved me from embarrassment a few times (but one has to set it up first; it delays one’s emails by a short period, such as 30 seconds, during which time it is possible to undo the email).
4. LaTeX rendering in Inkscape.  I used to use plain text to write mathematical formulae in my images, which always looked terrible.  It took me years to realise that Inkscape had the functionality to compile LaTeX within it.
5. Bookmarks in TeXnicCenter.  I probably only use a tiny fraction of the functionality that TeXnicCenter offers, but one little feature I quite like is the ability to bookmark a portion of the TeX file (e.g. the bibliography at the end, or the place one is currently editing) with one hot-key (Ctrl-F2) and then one can cycle quickly between one bookmarked location and another with some further hot-keys (F2 and shift-F2).
6. Actually, there are a number of Windows keyboard shortcuts that are worth experimenting with (and similarly for Mac or Linux systems of course).
7. Detexify has been the quickest way for me to locate the TeX code for a symbol that I couldn’t quite remember (or when hunting for a new symbol that would roughly be shaped like something I had in mind).
8. For writing LaTeX on my blog, I use Luca Trevisan’s LaTeX to WordPress Python script (together with a little batch file I wrote to actually run the python script).
9. Using the camera on my phone to record a blackboard computation or a slide (or the wifi password at a conference centre, or any other piece of information that is written or displayed really).  If the phone is set up properly this can be far quicker than writing it down with pen and paper.  (I guess this particular trick is now quite widely used, but I still see people surprised when someone else uses a phone instead of a pen to record things.)
10. Using my online calendar not only to record scheduled future appointments, but also to block out time to do specific tasks (e.g. reserve 2-3pm at Tuesday to read paper X, or do errand Y).  I have found I am able to get a much larger fraction of my “to do” list done on days in which I had previously blocked out such specific chunks of time, as opposed to days in which I had left several hours unscheduled (though sometimes those hours were also very useful for finding surprising new things to do that I had not anticipated).  (I learned of this little trick online somewhere, but I have long since lost the original reference.)

Anyway, I would very much like to hear what other little tools or features other readers have found useful in their work.

Just a short post to note that Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has just announced that the 2017 Abel prize has been awarded to Yves Meyer, “for his pivotal role in the development of the mathematical theory of wavelets”.  The actual prize ceremony will be at Oslo in May.

I am actually in Oslo myself currently, having just presented Meyer’s work at the announcement ceremony (and also having written a brief description of some of his work).  The Abel prize has a somewhat unintuitive (and occasionally misunderstood) arrangement in which the presenter of the work of the prize is selected independently of the winner of the prize (I think in part so that the choice of presenter gives no clues as to the identity of the laureate).  In particular, like other presenters before me (which in recent years have included Timothy Gowers, Jordan Ellenberg, and Alex Bellos), I agreed to present the laureate’s work before knowing who the laureate was!  But in this case the task was very easy, because Meyer’s areas of (both pure and applied) harmonic analysis and PDE fell rather squarely within my own area of expertise.  (I had previously written about some other work of Meyer in this blog post.)  Indeed I had learned about Meyer’s wavelet constructions as a graduate student while taking a course from Ingrid Daubechies.   Daubechies also made extremely important contributions to the theory of wavelets, but due to a conflict of interest (as per the guidelines for the prize committee) arising from Daubechies’ presidency of the International Mathematical Union (which nominates the majority of the members of the Abel prize committee, who then serve for two years) from 2011 to 2014 (and her continuing service ex officio on the IMU executive committee from 2015 to 2018), she will not be eligible for the prize until 2021 at the earliest, and so I do not think this prize should be necessarily construed as a judgement on the relative contributions of Meyer and Daubechies to this field.  (In any case I fully agree with the Abel prize committee’s citation of Meyer’s pivotal role in the development of the theory of wavelets.)

[Update, Mar 28: link to prize committee guidelines and clarification of the extent of Daubechies’ conflict of interest added. -T]

The self-chosen remit of my blog is “Updates on my research and expository papers, discussion of open problems, and other maths-related topics”.  Of the 774 posts on this blog, I estimate that about 99% of the posts indeed relate to mathematics, mathematicians, or the administration of this mathematical blog, and only about 1% are not related to mathematics or the community of mathematicians in any significant fashion.

This is not one of the 1%.

Mathematical research is clearly an international activity.  But actually a stronger claim is true: mathematical research is a transnational activity, in that the specific nationality of individual members of a research team or research community are (or should be) of no appreciable significance for the purpose of advancing mathematics.  For instance, even during the height of the Cold War, there was no movement in (say) the United States to boycott Soviet mathematicians or theorems, or to only use results from Western literature (though the latter did sometimes happen by default, due to the limited avenues of information exchange between East and West, and former did occasionally occur for political reasons, most notably with the Soviet Union preventing Gregory Margulis from traveling to receive his Fields Medal in 1978 EDIT: and also Sergei Novikov in 1970).    The national origin of even the most fundamental components of mathematics, whether it be the geometry (γεωμετρία) of the ancient Greeks, the algebra (الجبر) of the Islamic world, or the Hindu-Arabic numerals $0,1,\dots,9$, are primarily of historical interest, and have only a negligible impact on the worldwide adoption of these mathematical tools. While it is true that individual mathematicians or research teams sometimes compete with each other to be the first to solve some desired problem, and that a citizen could take pride in the mathematical achievements of researchers from their country, one did not see any significant state-sponsored “space races” in which it was deemed in the national interest that a particular result ought to be proven by “our” mathematicians and not “theirs”.   Mathematical research ability is highly non-fungible, and the value added by foreign students and faculty to a mathematics department cannot be completely replaced by an equivalent amount of domestic students and faculty, no matter how large and well educated the country (though a state can certainly work at the margins to encourage and support more domestic mathematicians).  It is no coincidence that all of the top mathematics department worldwide actively recruit the best mathematicians regardless of national origin, and often retain immigration counsel to assist with situations in which these mathematicians come from a country that is currently politically disfavoured by their own.

Of course, mathematicians cannot ignore the political realities of the modern international order altogether.  Anyone who has organised an international conference or program knows that there will inevitably be visa issues to resolve because the host country makes it particularly difficult for certain nationals to attend the event.  I myself, like many other academics working long-term in the United States, have certainly experienced my own share of immigration bureaucracy, starting with various glitches in the renewal or application of my J-1 and O-1 visas, then to the lengthy vetting process for acquiring permanent residency (or “green card”) status, and finally to becoming naturalised as a US citizen (retaining dual citizenship with Australia).  Nevertheless, while the process could be slow and frustrating, there was at least an order to it.  The rules of the game were complicated, but were known in advance, and did not abruptly change in the middle of playing it (save in truly exceptional situations, such as the days after the September 11 terrorist attacks).  One just had to study the relevant visa regulations (or hire an immigration lawyer to do so), fill out the paperwork and submit to the relevant background checks, and remain in good standing until the application was approved in order to study, work, or participate in a mathematical activity held in another country.  On rare occasion, some senior university administrator may have had to contact a high-ranking government official to approve some particularly complicated application, but for the most part one could work through normal channels in order to ensure for instance that the majority of participants of a conference could actually be physically present at that conference, or that an excellent mathematician hired by unanimous consent by a mathematics department could in fact legally work in that department.

With the recent and highly publicised executive order on immigration, many of these fundamental assumptions have been seriously damaged, if not destroyed altogether.  Even if the order was withdrawn immediately, there is no longer an assurance, even for nationals not initially impacted by that order, that some similar abrupt and major change in the rules for entry to the United States could not occur, for instance for a visitor who has already gone through the lengthy visa application process and background checks, secured the appropriate visa, and is already in flight to the country.  This is already affecting upcoming or ongoing mathematical conferences or programs in the US, with many international speakers (including those from countries not directly affected by the order) now cancelling their visit, either in protest or in concern about their ability to freely enter and leave the country.  Even some conferences outside the US are affected, as some mathematicians currently in the US with a valid visa or even permanent residency are uncertain if they could ever return back to their place of work if they left the country to attend a meeting.  In the slightly longer term, it is likely that the ability of elite US institutions to attract the best students and faculty will be seriously impacted.  Again, the losses would be strongest regarding candidates that were nationals of the countries affected by the current executive order, but I fear that many other mathematicians from other countries would now be much more concerned about entering and living in the US than they would have previously.

It is still possible for this sort of long-term damage to the mathematical community (both within the US and abroad) to be reversed or at least contained, but at present there is a real risk of the damage becoming permanent.  To prevent this, it seems insufficient for me for the current order to be rescinded, as desirable as that would be; some further legislative or judicial action would be needed to begin restoring enough trust in the stability of the US immigration and visa system that the international travel that is so necessary to modern mathematical research becomes “just” a bureaucratic headache again.

Of course, the impact of this executive order is far, far broader than just its effect on mathematicians and mathematical research.  But there are countless other venues on the internet and elsewhere to discuss these other aspects (or politics in general).  (For instance, discussion of the qualifications, or lack thereof, of the current US president can be carried out at this previous post.) I would therefore like to open this post to readers to discuss the effects or potential effects of this order on the mathematical community; I particularly encourage mathematicians who have been personally affected by this order to share their experiences.  As per the rules of the blog, I request that “the discussions are kept constructive, polite, and at least tangentially relevant to the topic at hand”.

Some relevant links (please feel free to suggest more, either through comments or by email):

I just learned (from Emmanuel Kowalski’s blog) that the AMS has just started a repository of open-access mathematics lecture notes.  There are only a few such sets of notes there at present, but hopefully it will grow in the future; I just submitted some old lecture notes of mine from an undergraduate linear algebra course I taught in 2002 (with some updating of format and fixing of various typos).

[Update, Dec 22: my own notes are now on the repository.]

[This guest post is authored by Caroline Series.]

The Chern Medal is a relatively new prize, awarded once every four years jointly by the IMU
and the Chern Medal Foundation (CMF) to an individual whose accomplishments warrant
the highest level of recognition for outstanding achievements in the field of mathematics.
Funded by the CMF, the Medalist receives a cash prize of US\$ 250,000.  In addition, each
Medalist may nominate one or more organizations to receive funding totalling US\$ 250,000, for the support of research, education, or other outreach programs in the field of mathematics.

Professor Chern devoted his life to mathematics, both in active research and education, and in nurturing the field whenever the opportunity arose. He obtained fundamental results in all the major aspects of modern geometry and founded the area of global differential geometry. Chern exhibited keen aesthetic tastes in his selection of problems, and the breadth of his work deepened the connections of geometry with different areas of mathematics. He was also generous during his lifetime in his personal support of the field.

Nominations should be sent to the Prize Committee Chair:  Caroline Series, email: chair@chern18.mathunion.org by 31st December 2016. Further details and nomination guidelines for this and the other IMU prizes can be found at http://www.mathunion.org/general/prizes/

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