Blogs about Mathematics

Here we are going to look at several diagnostic plots are helpful when attempting to answer a causal question. They can be used to visualize the target population, balance, and treatment effect heterogeneity. Setup I’ve …

Regular expressions are an algebraic notation to describe regular languages. They can be converted into minimal deterministic finite automata with the elegant Brzozowski algorithm.

Today I learned how to automatically push code changes while I'm doing live coding, for example while teaching. Automatically push code changes during live coding When I'm doing live coding during tutorials / workshops / …

Every year, TeX Live updates in a breaking way. This year it was on 13 March 2024. I don't notice until I need to do something somewhat uncommon with my TeX distribution, such as compiling …

Different policies introduced by a social planner, whether the government of a country or the head of an institution, lead to situations in which different peoples' lives go better or worse. That is, in the …

There’s a dot product and cross product of vectors in 3 dimensions. But there’s also a dot product and cross product in 7 dimensions obeying a lot of the same identities! There’s nothing really like …

Unlike the Chartr newsletter, I love this as it feeds my fascination with data and provides interesting examples for the class. As I sit here writing (5/11/24), I am enjoying my other favorite stats newsletter, …

Mark Kisin gave a talk at the number theory seminar last week where the following problem arose: Let \(W\) be the Galois representation associated to the Tate module of an abelian variety \(A\) over a …

Today I attended (remotely) a nice talk by Gareth Jones in the Ural Workshop on Group Theory and Combinatorics, about prime powers in permutation group theory and polynomials taking prime values in number theory. I …

I'm really happy to announce that we have a new paper on the arXiv: On decompositions for Fano schemes of intersections of two quadrics. The we here refers to my coauthors Jishnu Bose, Sarah Frei, …

The last time we did this it was so magnificent that I said, on the spot, “see you again in 2024,” and seven years didn’t dim my wish to see the sun wink out again. …

My post for this week can be found in the May 8, 2024 issue of the Ahwatukee Foothills News (p. 33). Norma Hubele and I wrote “Using Data to Make Our Roads Safer” to highlight …

Team Ratings for Week 17 The basic method is described on my Department home page. Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season. …

Here is an old joke. A cat is chasing a mouse, and the mouse hides into its little hole. While it’s in there, the mouse hears some barking, “Woof! Woof!” Smart mouse figures a dog …

The purpose of this post is to report an erratum to the 2012 paper “An inverse theorem for the Gowers -norm” of Ben Green, myself, and Tamar Ziegler (previously discussed in this blog post). The …

A huge amount happened in the Lean theorem prover community in 2023; this blog post looks back at some of these events, plus some of what we have to look forward to in 2024. Modern …

And It is official: I will not have an academia job. Stage 1: a suspicious insider joke During the middle of March, I realized that I had not heard back from any schools I had …