...the heck. Chasing the plagiarist I found a master's thesis, from which the user copied, which has an entire chapter just copied from some lecture notes,

What do I do with that information?

@bolbteppa Oh. That's easy after all! What about having the same homotopy types? "X and Y have the same homotopy type if there are continuous maps $f:Y\to X$ and $g:X\to Y$ such that $gf=\mathrm{id}_Y$ and $fg=\mathrm{id}_X$"? I think this is really the one that got me.

@ACuriousMind Out of curiosity, does the thesis cite the notes at any point (even if it doesn't admit that it's a direct quote without attribution)?

@ACuriousMind I don't know who the plagiarist is, but in the case of the master's thesis - are the lecture notes older than the thesis? My supervisor would be quite capable of just coping out of a thesis for his lecture note. If it's the inverse, in theory you should notify the university and professor which supervised the thesis in my view - it's debatable whether this really does any good though

@HDE226868 cc @knzhou Not that I can see. Thesis is here from 2015 and the lecture notes are lecture 10 here from 2010.

chapter 3 of the thesis is just the lecture notes with very minor modifications

Don't even get me started on how that thing is supposed to be a master thesis :P

a 28 pages master thesis O_O I could have saved 90 pages in print

or 180 as I needed to print twice

damn it

@Danu oooooo

@Danu What d'you plan for post-exam studies? Now that you're officially a mathematics student (which, welcome to the dark side).

the only thing he did was to calculate those two plots?! In any case, I'd honestly ignore it - nothing constructive is going to come out of it @ACuriousMind

@ACuriousMind Ooh, that's egregious.

@Sanya Yeah. At first I was dumbfounded that one chapter was copied verbatim, but on a closer look, the whole thing is ridiculous.

Not that any plagiarism isn't, but still.

doesn't do wonders for my belief in scientific integrity, though :P

What's the fuss about?

@NeuroFuzzy I grabbed my copy of Zee

I will dead the first chapter tonight

Read

Two pages of original work isn't a thesis; it's a small project. I can't understand how his supervisor thought that was a good idea.

@0celo7 Group theory?

plagiarize / let no one else's work evade your eyes / remember why the good lord made your eyes / so don't shade your eyes / but, plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize / only be sure to call it, please, research.

@ACuriousMind it's at least not a published work in a peer reviewed journal; I've seen horrible things which damaged my belief in science a lot more in those ...

@Sanya Oh, yeah, I'm inclined to believe that

@BalarkaSen Apparently one of the Russian sentences in that is "And now I go where even the Tzar goes on foot" - 'a reference to the bathroom'.

well, it helps accepting the inevitable departure from university @ACuriousMind :D

@Sanya What departure? oO

I'm not sure I can survive out in the wild

@ACuriousMind you've done the right thing and specialised in a field where there's lots of funding - in other fields, I think PhD is the highest reasonable expectation there is in this country

@NeuroFuzzy heh, I believe it

I've never seen a translation of those Russian bits

9 upvotes for what turns out to be entirely copy-pasted

This user hasn't written a single original sentence in their entire stay on this site, as it appears

That should have been a community wiki.

Well, I just added the citations in - the user tried to pass it off as their own work

physics.stackexchange.com/questions/268470/… << seems like original work :p

Oh, more plagiarism.

@Sanya Ah, yes, right, couldn't find anything for that one

@Sanya Well, evidently he "couldn't find anything [to plagiarize]"

:D

But he did try to look around.

Let's all appreciate the effort.

^ For reference.

@NeuroFuzzy QFT

@HDE226868 I've done this before, this isn't the first plagiarist I've discovered!

Oh my god there was a torrential downpour and the bottom of my backpack got soaked

Zee is in critical condition

Bott & Tu is damp

@ACuriousMind You beat me to another of his plagiarized answers.

Hirsch is OK

I'm flagging the ones I find particularly egregious, like just copypasting another user's answer to another question

Or the one that consists of two sentences and even those are copied

@0celo7 There's an application of quantum field theory. That's not so bad, now, is it? It saved your math books.

@Sanya Whoa whoa whoa. What is this magical field?

(cc @ACuriousMind)

ok

Bott and Tu has towels every 5 or so pages and has plenty of weight on it

@ACuriousMind I just flagged one of them and edited it; I don't know how many others there are.

QFT - at least in comparison to other stuff, that still gets quite an amount of funding here @knzhou

hoping to press out some of moisture

Gotta get some CRC tables

@HDE226868 I've been through them all now about 3 of them are original, and you can tell because the English is way worse than in the copied ones

What's all this fuss about?

@0celo7 Oh, I've found another user who copy-pastes their answers together

Link?

Poor Zee :(

@ACuriousMind How did you stumble across this?

@0celo7 Nice. I'll be mad if you get through the chapter in a night because I've been trudging through it.

@knzhou I'm not sure, I'm just a lowly master student as of now

@NeuroFuzzy This is like that one time I spilled beer on Zee's other book

@NeuroFuzzy I've read the book already

@HDE226868 It all began here.

I'm not going to bother following section 7 (on Feynman diagrams, IIRC)

I'd be here for weeks trying to figure out the factors

@ACuriousMind now I'm intimidated :o

@0celo7 Hehe, always coffee for me

I don't even think he explains the symmetry factors

He just says "oh there's symmetry factors"

@0celo7 Yep, I think so too.

Doesn't he say "look them up"

I haven't touched it in a year

@0celo7 Just look at, oh, about any post I've edited in the last hour

I have 15 volumes of a thermodynamics journal on Bott & Tu

Pressing out the moisture, maybe

You seem salty, @ACuriousMind

A worksheet by Marcolli its.caltech.edu/~matilde/Lecture2Notes.pdf doesn't even really explain it (in Zee's toy example)

@Sanya You're not the first person in this chat to say that in reaction to me being a master student :/

what section are you stuck on, @NeuroFuzzy

@ACuriousMind YOU'RE AN AI, NOT A MASTERS STUDENT

No, he's a troll.

@NeuroFuzzy Actually the real victims here are my Jordans :(

@0celo7 Yeah. After two people coming to this chat to insult me and hunting down the plagiarist's sources for a while my mood has suffered a bit :|

@ACuriousMind das ist nun gespielte Betroffenheit xD

@Sanya I couldn't decide on an appropriate emoticon :D

A ":D" or ":)" would've seemed smug

But no emotion also didn't seem right

@0celo7 I'm not really stuck. It's just a bit to trudge through.

@BalarkaSen An orc, dammit!

@Sanya That sentence does not make sense in German or English :/

I forget where exactly... I guess I was on canonical quantization when I left off

@ACuriousMind Looks like he has a decent amount of plagiarized stuff on Chemistry, where he's suspended for voting irregularities. I'm not sure I want to open that particular can of worms; I might contact the mods directly instead.

Oh god now I'm hungry

@0celo7 Hm? Makes perfect sense to me

@0celo7 ernsthaft nu?

I'm stuck here until my stuff dries out

@Sanya Ich denke schon

@ACuriousMind but well, either way, I'm happy for you :)

@ACuriousMind What's it in response to?

@0celo7 what's your problem with it?

@0celo7 Sanya's sentence sounds perfectly fine to me

I must be missing context

I'm translating that as "feigned dismay," is that incorrect?

@0celo7 Yeah, and it referred to my ":/"

That does not make sense in either language...

What's it supposed to mean?

@NeuroFuzzy I can't read until it's less wet, don't want to tear pages

@HDE226868 That's...interesting

@0celo7 smart. That's too bad.

I hope it's an international edition and not an $80 hardcover?

It's an $80 hardcover.

Thankfully Bott & Tu is a $25 paperback.

that you are pretending to be dismayed to make yourself appear more positive in the opinion of the others, basically

@0celo7 Dang! Haha I worked myself up to spend $80 on the group theory book (since i've had so little luck with books on Lie groups for physics)

That's like. Four all-you-can-eat korean bbq outings

In that sweet time after getting disposable income and before having kids, I'll buy books

@ACuriousMind I pinged the mods. I'll wait and see.

hardcovers

shit, my charger is wet

how does the bottom of the backpack get soaked :/

I had an umbrella, the top was fine

...did you put it on a wet surface? :P

No

Gives the book character I guess

Shankar has hot sauce stains

other Zee has beer and hot sauce

Staumann is fucking torn apart

You need to learn to handle your books

@0celo7 Karma

What's more impressive is that my keyboard survived the beer

@0celo7 my copy of rudin has the first six chapters on the edges totally smudged/dirty

@BalarkaSen Straumann isn't my fault, Springer made a mistake when binding it

(on the edges)

(I shouldn't talk, first few pages of my copy of Hatcher is in pieces - I have them cellotaped)

and the last five totally fine

so just by glancing at the edge of the book you can tell what I've read thoroughly XD

Zee's GR book is pretty much brown on the side I read it so much

well, and beer

but that's on the bottom

@BalarkaSen Oh, I dropped Guillemin & Pollack and one of the pages is messed up

My G-P's hardcover, so that's a relief.

Mine is too

AMS Chelsea?

Yes

Nice.

My laptop charger is broken.

So are you.

So what do you expect ...

Wait

Oh it was that outlet

thank god

Well, what do now

I could read Hirsch

but why would I do that

Read Hirsch? Meh.

It's not good as a textbook, IMHO. More as a reference and exercise book.

Might as well take a look at some Ricci flow

Whew, this book has seen some coffee

This book doesn't seem to be PDE heavy at all

@BalarkaSen Want to read it with me?

Ricci flows at 4AM is not a good idea

I want some light reading in addition to Bott & Tu

A man can only do so much cohomology before getting bored

Cohomology is a nice, gentlemanly thing to do.

...why are there linear algebra 1 homework sheets in this Seiberg-Witten theory book?

I blame a TA

@ACuriousMind : Thanks. Now merged.

This book looks like one of those made up papers

@ACuriousMind what's that site

that randomly generates physics papers

Cool.

snarxiv

That's a hands-on way to construct one to one correspondences between codimension 1 submanifolds of $M$ and line bundles on $M$ in general, it seems.

@ACuriousMind "notes on Seiberg-Witten theory" is that, basically.

How did he get that idea? Really interesting.

@ACuriousMind Hahahaha!

@ACuriousMind vixra's better than that.

One generated: "... provided that the analytic continuation of a model for instanton liquids can be interpreted as a GUT extension of hydrodynamics."

@BalarkaSen but you can't play arxiv vs. vixra. Give snarxiv vs. arxiv (upper right corner) a try, it's pretty hard!

Ah...

huh

"Progress in Abelian Charges"

I made 3 guesses

each of them were wrong

3/5

I'll stop with "barely above statistical average" XD

starting fresh, 4/6

stuff with too long titles are fake

Love the "Better than a monkey. Worse than a monkey. Like a monkey" grades.

woo 70%

it's a nice game

7/10 too, yay

...

i'm not a physics major, fwiw

N=6 QFT is not a thing

That's got to be it

@0celo7 You totally can have a N=6 supersymmetric QFT

At least in certain dimensions

upper limit for 4D is N=8, iirc

You would not call it QFT is what I'm saying

It would be N=6 SUSY

"Heterotic on Half-flat"

What the?

@0celo7 Ah, but some people word things weirdly

arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0408121

HOW

This is too hard

there's no such guy as X. Vafa

^ and Randall would've been L., not E.

you don't see the authors...

Ah. right

@ACuriousMind we know you stalked Laura

@0celo7 It's Lisa

SEE

(yes I know that doesn't help my case)

Only a creep would know that

in any case, the authors of the paper I linked need to choose names carefully

"1st year grad student"

@ACuriousMind You know all about Ricci flow, right?

@0celo7 whatever gave you that impression?

amazon.com/Sphere-Theorem-Graduate-Studies-Mathematics/dp/…

Because we're gonna read this book

It's short, and not the PDE hell that is the other AMS book on Ricci flow

this should be more geometrical

yikes it's late i gotta run

Also they use algebraic geometry at some points @ACuriousMind

@0celo7 I can barely contain my joy

It does not contain "sobolev space" as far as I can see

@ACuriousMind Ah, I had hoped as much.

Time to read some QFT.

oh god, Wick contraction

I'm already lost

@NeuroFuzzy are you still here

@ACuriousMind How do you write the transition amplitude $|q_I\rangle\to |q_F\rangle$ in terms of the vacuum amplitude $Z$

damn you Zee, what are you talking about

@NeuroFuzzy I hate this book

oh man these arguments hurt

@ACuriousMind What does "the vacuum in QFT is a stormy sea of quantum fluctuations" mean?

@0celo7 Uh...I think that's just the path integral over paths starting at $q_I$ and ending at $q_F$.

@0celo7 I refuse to answer that

@ACuriousMind how come?

I'm not a physicist

I don't want my mood to get worse :P

I'm getting bored by this book

No rigor

I know everything here, too

oh, maybe you can clear something up

@ACuriousMind He claims to calculate the energy of a delta function sending a boson to another delta function

what the fuck is going on

$Z[J]=Z\mathrm e^{\mathrm iW[J]}$

and $W[J]$ is a quadratic functional in the source

is this calculation legit?

he argues then that $Z[J]=\mathrm e^{-\mathrm i ET}$??

This never made sense to me

@ACuriousMind wow a 20 page thesis!!!

@BalarkaSen Great minds think alike.

@0celo7 Ahh this one is because he is talking about the ground state of the new hamiltonian $H_0+J$

so it is a true energy eigenstate - the ground state of the new hamiltonian.

That tripped me up a bit.

ie, $Z_J=\langle 0_J | U(T)|0_J\rangle=e^{-i E T}$