10-Aug-2006

The above is the letter presenting the resignation of the editorial board of Topology, an Elsevier journal. The journal has been discontinued as of this year.

[...] As you are well aware, the Editors have been concerned about the price of Topology since Elsevier gained control of the journal in 1994. [...] The journal Topology has an illustrious history with which we, on becoming editors, were extremely proud to be associated. [...] However, we feel that Elsevier’s policies towards the publication of mathematics research have undermined this legacy.

Therefore, with great reluctance and sadness, we have made the difficult decision to resign. [...]

On Google+, David Roberts gave a link to the journal’s site, with some highlights: As you can see here, the last published issue (vol. 48, 2-4) was June-December 2009. The previous issue was 40 pages and consisted of 2 papers (that you can purchase access to, at $31.50 each. Plus tax.) And there is also a supplement, published on December 2011. Only $31.50 (plus tax) for a 4 page correction.

For some context, see this blog post by Tim Gowers and this page.

Hilbert is one of the mathematicians I admire the most. I believe I first learned about him while in High School, through “Higher Geometry” by N.V. Efimov. My copy of Reid’s “Hilbert” is one of the first books I bought when I arrived in the States (in 1997).

Here is a link to the reprint in the Bulletin of the AMS of Mathematical Problems.

I would love to have a poster sized copy of the picture above. Springer sold them years ago, but now they seem impossible to find.

For example, here the boy is running away from an explosion.

He is learning to spell, but he is stubborn. And sometimes he spells backwards. So Y-R-M-A-C A-T-O-Y-O-T spells car.

His favorite movie right now is Jumanji. During the stampede scenes, the living room gets destroyed. He is thorough.

For christmas he got the Doctor, and for his birthday, a bike. And, of course, a million other things.

All of which must be uniformly spread through the living room while elephants trumpet.

Alan Turing was born in London on June 23, 1912. The Alan Turing Year 2012 celebrates his life and scientific achievements. Here is a link to the official page.

Widely recognize for his contributions during the Second War to the solving of German ciphers, Turing is also responsible for the development of computer science, having isolated the key notion of Turing machine, the mathematical formalization of algorithm. He is also known for the notion of Turing test, aimed at “recognizing” artificial intelligence.

Unfortunately, Turing’s story is marred by his end. Rather than being held as a war hero (or a renown academic), being a homosexual, in 1952 Turing was charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 and required to undergo hormonal treatment, including chemical castration. Turing committed suicide on June 7, 1954. On September 10, 2009, the British government finally issued an apology.

Here is a link to the excellent Wikipedia entry on Turing. And here is a link to the Alan Turing page, maintained by Andrew Hodges, author of Alan Turing: The Enigma.

The talk today covered some of my recent results with Richard Ketchersid on the structure of natural models of determinacy. (I have discussed technical details of the proofs in other talks, also available at the page linked to above.) At the end I touched on some recent results with Boban Velickovic on failures of square principles (inspired by similar recent results of Dilip Raghavan), and on the results of the SQuaRE group I am a part of:

The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “Writer’s block”

Maths is very important to Google. It’s the basis of everything we do: from the algorithms that deliver answers to your search queries, to the way in which your Gmails are grouped in conversations, to the technology advances which are enabling us to develop driverless cars.

[...]

And so yesterday, together with the Advisory Board of the International Mathematical Olympiad, we were proud to announce that we are making a gift of one million euros to the organisation to help cover the costs of the next five global events (2011-15).

Here is a link to the AMS page for it, a link to its table of contents, and the preface:

The Boise Extravaganza in Set Theory (BEST) started in 1992 as a small, locally funded conference dedicated to Set Theory and its Applications. A number of years after its inception BEST started being funded by the National Science Foundation. Without this funding it would not have been possible to maintain the conference. The conference remained relatively small with many opportunities for its participants to meet informally. We like to think that during these years BEST has made it possible for the numerous set theorists who have participated in it to absorb, besides the new developments featured in the conference talks, also part of the folklore and traditions of the field of set theory and its relatives. An explicit effort was made to bring together role models from various career stages in set theory as well as the new generation to support some notion of continuity in the field.
This volume has a similar purpose. In it the reader will find valuable papers ranging from surveys that put in print here set theoretic knowledge that has been around for several decades as unpublished lore, to hybrid survey-research papers, to pure research papers. Readers can be assured of the authority of each paper since each has been carefully refereed. The reader will also find that the subjects treated in these papers range over several of the historically strongly represented areas of set theory and its relatives. Rather than expounding the virtues of each paper individually here, we invite the reader to learn from the authors.
Bringing to publication such a collection of papers is not possible without the generous dedication of authors and referees and the services of a publisher. We would like to thank all authors and referees for their selfless contributions to this volume. And we particularly would like to thank the publisher, Contemporary Mathematics, and Christine Thivierge, for the guidance they provided during this process.

The effort have the potential to pay off handsomely today

That’s just ok. But then:

People try thing, because they just don’t want it enough.

And finally:

Photographic memory! Remember to put in film, or its digital!?

Two examples:

From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid.

For the last, colleges are a perfect launching ground—they are built to reward the rich and to forgive them their laziness. Let’s be honest: The successful among us are not always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn’t get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.

And:

The 75-page paper on business ethics ultimately expanded into a 160-page graduate thesis, every word of which was written by me.

Edit: The article has been commented at the always interesting Making Light. Here is the link, read the comments.