Homotopy Theory

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Jon Beardsley

00:43

HOORAY!!

title = {Products in the Atiyah-Hirzebruch Spectral Sequence and the Calculation of $MSO_\ast$.},
author = {Brayton Gray},

Only took me like 3 days of searching.

Drew

01:36

Imagine if it was pre internet days!

Jon Beardsley

ugh. no way.

Tyler Lawson

pre-internet paper searches had several awesome qualities

Peter Nelson

such as

Tyler Lawson

you'd actually sit in the library and read, without popping into f'book every few minutes

Peter Nelson

oh, yeah ok

Drew

01:42

Ha!

Tyler Lawson

you'd grab a volume of some journal and see several interesting papers nearby

so you'd flip through those and find some totally interesting and practically forgotten results

when you were looking through Math Reviews you'd browse through the big orange books

which was like a condensed version of the same

if you pulled out a conference proceedings, you wouldn't get isolated papers but you would get this whole snapshot in time of what was going on

unfortunately the internet has made it too easy to not spend much time in the library

now I just read the above and I sound like a crazy old person

Drew

Next you'll be telling us about how great it was when you corresponded by letter rather than email (actually, I do think letters are kind of great)

Peter Nelson

no! I found that interesting.

Eric Peterson

not crazy at all, i do all those things when i have to go to the library to find conference proceedings, it is enjoyable

not enjoyable enough to do it more than twice a year though

Drew

The library is my office at the moment. It's kind of handy when you need to look something up

Peter Nelson

01:52

oh, so actual math question (I know it's a saturday night, sorry)

Tyler Lawson

I'm not old enough for letters -- my understanding is that phone conversations made a huge difference in that respect.

Peter Nelson

can one prove Morava E is $H_\infty$ without proving its $E_\infty$.

Tyler Lawson

i try to imagine a universe where "the Grothendieck-Serre emails" were a thing and I don't think it'll happen

Peter Nelson

does Ando's thesis do this?

I sadly haven't really read it

Tyler Lawson

@PeterNelson It seems plausible. All you basically need to know there is something about the E-cohomology of symmetric powers of copies of E.

My recollection is that there are some things in Ando-Hopkins-Strickland about this

Tyler Lawson

02:09

wow, matt has a great dedication in his thesis

CPM

More disgusting - the grothendieck--serre facebook chat

Jon Beardsley

@TylerLawson that's a problem for me, lol

Tyler Lawson

ando's thesis seems to say in 1.4 (available in the preview on dspace) that he has thm 5.3.5 which "almost" constructs power operations in E-theory, but doesn't finish the job

by the time he wrote the Duke J. paper, he was referencing an E_infty structure due to Hopkins-Miller (which had not yet appeared) ;)

Peter Nelson

I guess by "thesis" I meant the duke paper, I think

Jon Beardsley

@EricPeterson @TylerLawson I like to go to the library and come out with 6 or 7 books, and take them back to my office. i have like 12 books on hopf algebras in my office, and a bunch on non-associative algebra. i really don't know what i'll ever do with them, but any time i go to the library, this happens

Tyler Lawson

02:18

i have just boxes of papers that I photocopied when I was a graduate student, with the idea that I would read them someday

Eric Peterson

matt's dedication is extremely cute

Tyler Lawson

now they sit and mock me openly, as opposed to quietly like all the PDFs on my hard drive

Eric Peterson

justin noel's thesis is the other cute one i know of, with the various adams quotes

Jon Beardsley

oh yeah. i got a metal shelf for $5 next to mydesk, heaped with papers.

i wanna write a cute thesis.

Drew

I'd just settle for thesis at this rate. Cute or otherwise

Jon Beardsley

02:19

well, yeah.

Drew

Hey @JonBeardsley I just booked my Baltimore flights

Jon Beardsley

YEAH!

what do you wanna do when you're here?

Drew

MATHS!

Jon Beardsley

see some live experimental baltimore music?

well yeah, that'd be cool too.

what kind of math should we do

Drew

Analysis

For a laugh

Jon Beardsley

02:21

lolol

we should think about lubin tate theory.

Drew

Sure! I hope Jack is around

Jon Beardsley

yeah.... me too.

@Drew well, if i can write a thesis, i suspect I can make it cute. but yeah, the math is the hard part.

Tyler Lawson

02:38

once upon a time i was seriously worried about not being able to stretch my thesis past 5 pages. eventually you can sort these things out

Jon Beardsley

lol

what's your thesis on tyler?

Tyler Lawson

"derived" completions of rings

Jon Beardsley

or i suppose a more sensible question is, is it on ur website?

oh sweet.

Tyler Lawson

no, but this has the main results and is actually correct: math.umn.edu/~tlawson/papers/comp.pdf

Jon Beardsley

aw frick. this looks awesome!

Tyler Lawson

02:42

was a weird story. did so, so many computations and the main result of the thesis took something Gunnar showed me and turned it into "hey, this lets you get the result without having to do all the intermediate computations"

Jon Beardsley

aha.

Tyler Lawson

one day I was telling him about this computation I'd done, and he didn't think it was right

in about 5 minutes he wrote down some poincare series that didn't agree with what I'd calculated

i checked, and he was RIGHT

and i had no idea why his method worked

figuring out why turned out to be my thesis

Jon Beardsley

wow, haha. cool.

though probably very frustrating.

Tyler Lawson

ha!

let me tell you frustrating

my ORIGINAL thesis problem, after about a year and a half, turned out to be corollary 4.13 in a paper I didn't know about

;)

Jon Beardsley

oy.

Tyler Lawson

02:48

after you experience that, it's hard to be phased by other minor setbacks

Jon Beardsley

hahah.

Drew

I'm always scared someone is going to something put up on the arxiv one day completely solving what I'm trying to do

But already solved...

Eric Peterson

but who

Jon Beardsley

have u ever read that short article, "the emotional perils of being a mathematician" or whatever?

Tyler Lawson

well, you can avoid that problem by working on math nobody cares about

Jon Beardsley

02:51

<----this guy

Tyler Lawson

if it happens, it's very rare that what appears is completely subsuming what you know

usually you have some perspective that clarifies what the paper's authors are a little fuzzy about

Jon Beardsley

one of nitu's students just had this happen to him

luckily he hadn't been working on the problem too intensely fortoo long

Tyler Lawson

wow. what on, if I can ask?

Jon Beardsley

ah, i'm not too well versed in this. something to do with loop groups? that's literally all i can say.

i have a memory of asking him about it, but then he walked up to the board, and my mind just kind of fades to black.

sorry :(

something rather geometrical.

Tyler Lawson

no worries

Jon Beardsley

02:57

i would just like to say, i'd like to bring back to everyone's attention this amazing paper by stefan schwede: arxiv.org/pdf/math/0402372.pdf

like.... WTF

Jon Beardsley

03:12

there should be a connection to MU right???

like, if we construct $D\mathbb{Z}$ for the universal FGL over Z something....

1 hour later…

Jon Beardsley

04:25

uhhhhh anyone in here right now? I think i worked something out, but i really don't trust myself, and would like to run it by someone.

and by "worked something out" I mean noticed something pretty trivial.

nevermind. i mean... i did work something out, but it's still not quite what i wanted to do.

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