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 use named tuples to improve readability and flexibility of test parametrisations in pytest. Better test parametrisation in pytest Today I attended a pytest tutorial at PyCon DE 2024 and I …

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 …

You thought this series was dead. But it was only dormant! In Part 1, I explained how the classification of holomorphic line bundles on a complex torus XX breaks into two parts: the ‘discrete part’: …

We should teach with data sets representing ALL of our students. Why? You never know what example will stick in a student's head. One way to get information to stick in is by employing the …

Plein Air is certainly the best cafe in Hyde Park. (Arguably Build Coffee is fine as well, but they are only open about 5 hours a week.) But it is also true to say that …

The island of Ischia, about a 45-minute hydrofoil ride from Napoli, is rich in history. The museum has a Homeric drinking cup with an inscription in ancient Greek from the 8th century BCE. At the …

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. …

The safety statistics presented at a recent Tempe, AZ neighborhood meeting sounded impressive. The speaker was proposing “asphalt art” — painting designs on the intersection and crosswalks as in Figure 1 — for a neighborhood …

Team Ratings for Week 15 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. …

I gave a short talk about my favorite math jokes at G4G15. G4G stands for the Gathering for Gardner, my favorite conference. Here is a joke about Heisenberg from my talk. * * * Heisenberg …

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 …