@dc3rd I am at a community college (so only at the fringes of academia). The CTE (career and technical education; essentially, vocational education) faculty (who tend to lead Trump) regard the A&S (arts and sciences) faculty as a bunch of "effete, beta, cuck libs". They don't usually appear at the faculty association meetings, as they have all chosen to take on extreme overload in order to get paid more.
I was one of three A&S faculty who were very vocal about voting down the motion. The other two are known commies, so I kinda came out of the closet, and probably earned some enemies for life.
Interesting......I don't know why I continue to have this view of academia being this utopia of ideas free from the brinksmanship of "ordinary" life......then I remember that there is a tenured controversial professor at my institution who was hopped on the extreme right wing wave for personal gain.....
the weird thing is that a lot of the stereotypically worst traits of professors are more common in less professional groups. pedantry, knowitallism, etc. all decrease monotonically as you go from undergrad to grad to teaching.
I think that first year [anything] is pretty bad. When you go into mathematics after graduating from high school, it is because you were hot shit in high school, so you think that you are going to continue to be hot shit.
You either realize that everyone else in your program was also hot shit in high school, or it turns out that you really are the smartest person in the room.
If you really are the smartest person in the room, you eventually run into smarter people (as a first year grad student, as a post doc, etc).
But the transition is gonna be rough, and you'll come across as an asshole to everyone around you for a while.
a lot of the knowitallism i saw in early grad school involved the somewhat drastic adjustment from small undergrad schools where math classes were mostly taken by miniature mathematicians in waiting to a state school with large engineering and bio programs where a whole lot of math is taken by people who can't be bothered with mathematician stuff.
there was a mandatory training course for first-time TAs and the instructors spent a lot of time emphasizing, please keep at least one eye and maybe both eyes on what is actually going on in lecture and do not inject too much of your own view as to the 'right' way of looking at something. i didn't understand this at first. then i got it.
@leslietownes There are a couple of folk who ended up at UCR after doing undergraduate or masters work with Vaughn Jones. I am sorry that I never met him---he seemed like a genuinely humane human being.
i kept some of my exams. one time i completely screwed up a problem and he pointed out a way i could have saved it that, of course, i would never have thought of. and congratulated me on 'my' idea.
i don't get into it because the cult of personality is strong in that one. and it's fine for people to like good math.
that's something i generally like about math, it's easier than in other areas to separate the work from the person, and there tend not to be personality cults. in the arts the lines get a lot blurrier.
i analogize the brain to a complex system of gears. the mathematical portion of the gearbox can function perfectly when there are a lot of teeth and screws missing in the other parts.
i don't think anything above implied grothendieck was a nazi. but the middle of the last century was full of mathematicians who were close enough to give one pause.
i remember that in grad school, seeing a cite to some german name in a paper and wonder, should i google this? was this paper published long enough ago?
metaphorical lists i think. although there are a few books on nazi mathematicians and the uncomfortable political history of that time that do function as actual lists.
from a quick read on Grothendieck he seems quite the interesting person....iconoclastic.........teaching a lecture on algebraic geometry in the jungles of Hanoi when bombing was occurring?........in Caribbean culture we'd call that a "madmon"...
When Grothendieck was still an undergraduate student at the University of Montpellier, his professor, Laurent Schwartz, gave him an article he had published not long before which included fourteen major unresolved problems, and asked Grothendieck to choose one of them for his thesis.
The young man, who was always bored and distracted in his classes and seemed incapable of following instructions, returned three months later. Schwartz asked him which problem he had chosen and how far along he had got. Grothendieck looked at him, baffled. What did he mean by “which one”? He had solved all of them.
the chain of restaurants? sounds great. chuck e cheese would also be acceptable.
i used to work with a guy who was given a comically large sword as some kind of trinket for assisting medieval times in their chapter 11 reorganization
zuck's tenure is pretty surprising to me. founder control basically never makes sense, but you can sometimes understand it with a magnetic personality. in every public appearance, zuck looks like a turtle pried out of his shell, or a freshman who forgot to do his homework and is going to try to wing it anyway.
i mean, people DO know that there were twenty other social networks and fb just happened to take off due to its proximity to well connected rich people. there weren't 20 other knockoffs of CP/M when bill gates got started
copper there are perspectives where maybe you aren't wrong. classically i think people thought in terms of betti numbers which were rougher invariants of fundamental groups. i forget how they dealt with torsion. and generally homotopy groups are hard to compute.
@copper.hat The point (functors do have value) is that you can convert topology to algebra. Homology, cohomology, too, and in the final case you have a ring structure which sees things that group structures miss. Geometrically, that product structure corresponds to intersection theory.
Math is full of "can this be the "same" entity as that?" ... These algebraic structures allow you to say NO. Saying yes is harder.
Wordle took me 5 today — far past my mode score of 4 and a few 3s.
today there was a problem where a missing digit was guaranteed to be the same on both sides of the equation, but it was just luck if you could get it in time.
3b1b made a video about how you would measure the utility of a word (given previous attempts) with entropy. I.e., obviously you would pick words that maximize the overlap with other words in the dictionary first. got me thinking that the FBI for sure has had that software for years
i used to tutor a former cellist in the SF symphony in calculus. he sent me a check for like $30 every month to be available on email. multivariable calculus was his thing.
i have an aunt who has a farmhouse about an hour away from paris by train. she has dementia and i'm not sure her unreliable daughters are even keeping track of it.
@TedShifrin they really are under some delusion that they are going to strong arm the gov't into folding to their demands......The entitlement is astounding....
I am beginning to wonder if there is "foreign backers" as Leslie alludes to because 10M plus dollars is not a number to ignore in the amount they were able to raise from Go Fund Me even if it got seized
this damn Trump influenced wave has got folks turning their faces up at civility.....a damn lifelong grifter and crook has fully played 40+ M people for fools....I'm at a loss of words that the con has gone on this long and been this successful.....perplexed.....
i carry food in my holster and keep my ammo in a can
a lawyer friend finds it impossible to believe that i do not have a stash of weapons in the house. i don't. unless you consider my speedos to be weapons.
i'll take Lee's manifolds, that way if I run out of fuel...
i found a convex psq but i was too trivial for an answer :-(
one of my former coworkers has five pistols in her living room. i made the mistake of looking for a coaster and, oh hello! this is the glock 20, is it?
my mom's dad was in the massachusetts state police firearms analysis division. when people would rob banks with hollowed-out pistols and such he'd take them home as trophies. i don't think this was legal even then. anyway we have all these weird photos of my mom holding a luger at heads of teddy bears.
there's also a great photo of my grandfather holding a tommy gun in some kind of police training exercise. he looks like a mobster. it's the coolest thing i've ever seen.
Some of the first batches of Thompsons were bought (in America) by agents of the Irish Republic (notably the Irish politician Harry Boland). The first test of the Thompson in Ireland was performed by Irish Republican Army unit commander Tom Barry, of the West Cork Brigade, in the presence of IRA leader Michael Collins.[30]
the song "the merry ploughboy" was popularised when i was around 6-7, and my parents took us on a trip to belfast
back then you were stopped at gun point and searched at the border. as kids, we were sort of oblivious (normal :-)) so just kept singing the merry ploughboy, completely ignorant of the political senibilities
we continued during our trip to belfast and while staying at the hotel.
we're working with a UCD alum right now as an expert on a patent case. because of the rules we aren't required to disclose him. he gives us good ideas that we throw into our briefing and they create complications.
we had one case where our technical witnesses were all in china, it was hilarious. good luck getting a US court to force a chinese national to do anything.
they simply don't have to testify. they can agree to video stuff if they want, or to go to taiwan or the philippines or whatever. but if it's better that they don't, the other side gets nothing.
this drives US litigants crazy, but people need to understand that china is not the little brother of the US. it is its own thing now.
sure. federal courts can call on people who are geographically nearby. otherwise you need a treaty thing.
to be honest, inventor testimony is not a huge part of most patent lawsuits. there's case law saying that it is irrelevant in a bunch of places, precisely because it is bound to be self-serving.
that's the only time i was interested in ice skating, too.
i have very mixed feelings about the olympics. i think the level of focus that a person needs to apply to succeed, and the universe around them that needs to rotate their way to enable it, is narcissistic.
it's not surprising to me that if you get up at 5am every morning and do some sport thing for a few hours, you can do better than everyone else at it. i wonder what we prioritize by acting as though it is exceptional to commit to such things.
same. the pro part (however you interpret it) takes away for it all for me. (admittedly there is cultural bias here, but i like these lads: youtube.com/watch?v=G8LeDANQ7UE)
if $P \in \mathbb{Z}[X]$ is monic, $P = \prod_{j=1}^n (X - \alpha_j)$, $\alpha_j \in \mathbb{C}$, is there an easy way to see $P_m = \prod_{j=1}^n (X - \alpha_j^m) \in \mathbb{Z}[X]$ for any $m \geq 1$?
yeah I figured it would involve both of those, im guessing by theorem about symmetric polynomials you mean something like the newton-girard identities right?
I mean, we certainly get by theorem that every symmetric polynomial can be written in terms of elementary symmetric polynomials, that $P_m\in\mathbb{Q}[X]$
