Carry The Two

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J On Wednesday, I asked several of my students what tools they use to collaborate online on their problem sets. Several of them mentioned Discord. I am currently trying to set up a Discord channel for my class. I imagine I am not the only one in this situation, so I am writing up my progress as I go here . If you have relevant knowledge, please leave an answer to this question or edit mine! If you have questions to discuss, let’s do that in the comment thread here. And please promote this on twitter and wherever else math teacher’s gather! from Secret Blogging Seminar

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J There has been a dispute running through mathematical twitter about diversity statements in academic hiring. Prompted by that, Izabella Laba has just written an excellent post , which affirms the importance of diversity as a goal, but lays out the many tricky issues with diversity statements. It makes a lot of points I would like to make, and raises others that I hadn’t thought of but should have. In case there is someone reading this blog but not reading Professor Laba’s, go check it out. Sadly, this blog is still dead. I have a list of things I would like to write on it, but I have no idea when or if I will find the time. from Secret Blogging Seminar

http://ift.tt/1Nzvuqk Jadagul writes : Got a draft of the course schedule for next year. Looks like I might get to teach real analysis. I probably need someone to talk me out of trying to do everything in R^n. A subsequent update indicates that the more standard alternative is teaching one variable analysis . This is my second go around teaching rigorous multivariable analysis — key points are the multivariate chain rule, the inverse and implicit function theorems, Fubini’s theorem, the multivariate change of variables formula, the definition of manifolds, differential forms, Stokes’ theorem, the degree of a differentiable map and some preview of de Rham cohomology. I wouldn’t say I’m doing a great job, but at least I know why it’s hard to do. I haven’t taught single variable, but I have read over the day-to-day syllabus and problem sets of our most experienced instructor. Here is the conceptual difference: It is quite doable to start with the axioms of an ordered field and bu...

http://ift.tt/2Btkx8n My CAREER grant includes funding for a thesis-writing fellowship for graduate students who have done extraordinary teaching and outreach during their time as a grad student.  If you know any such grad students who are planning on graduating in the 2018-2019 school year please encourage them to apply.  Deadline is Jan 31 and details here . While I’m shamelessly plugging stuff for early career people, Dave Penneys, Julia Plavnik, and I are running an MRC this summer  in Quantum Symmetry.  It’s aimed at people at -2 to +5 years from Ph.D. working in tensor categories, subfactors, topological phases of matter, and related fields, and the deadline is Feb 15.   from Secret Blogging Seminar

http://ift.tt/2kpAIPX I’m throwing this post up quickly, because time is of the essence. I had hoped someone else would do the work. If they did, please link them in the comments. As many of you know, the US House and Senate have passed revisions to the tax code. According to the House, but not the Senate draft, graduate tuition remissions are taxed as income. Thus, here at U Michigan, our graduate stipend is 19K and our tuition is 12K. If the House version takes effect, our students would be billed as if receiving 31K without getting a penny more to pay it with. It is thus crucial which version of the bill goes forward. The first meeting of the reconciliation committee is TONIGHT, at 6 PM Eastern Time. Please contact your congress people. You can look up their contact information here . Even if they are clearly on the right side of this issue, they need to be able to report how many calls they have gotten about it when arguing with their colleagues. Remember — be polite, make it c...

http://ift.tt/2ogZT6D Readers may recall that during the 2013 “peak-Elsevier” period, Elsevier made an interesting concession to the mathematical community — they released all their old mathematical content (“old” here means a rolling 4-year embargo) under a fairly permissive licence. Unfortunately, sometime in the intervening period they have quietly withdrawn some of the rights they gave to that content. In particular, they no longer give the right to redistribute on non-commercial terms. Of course, the 2013 licence is no longer available on their website, but thankfully David Roberts saved a copy at http://ift.tt/2ogwzNo . The critical sentence there is “Users may access, download, copy, display, redistribute, adapt , translate, text mine and data mine the articles provided that: …” The new licence, at http://ift.tt/2oWQWhf now reads “Users may access, download, copy, translate, text and data mine ( but may not redistribute, display or adapt ) the articles for non-commerci...

http://ift.tt/29nbnjj A few weeks ago, I e-mailed Will Sawin excitedly to tell him that I could extend the new bounds on three-term arithmetic progression free subsets of to . Will politely told me that I was the third team to get there — he and Eric Naslund already had the result, as did Fedor Petrov. But I think there might be some expository benefit in writing up the three arguments, to see how they are all really the same trick underneath. Here is the result we are proving: Let be a prime power and let be the cyclic group of order . Let be a set which does not contain any three term arithmetic progression, except for the trivial progressions . Then The exciting thing about this bound is that it is exponentially better than the obvious bound of . Until recently, all people could prove was bounds like , and this is still the case if is not a prime power. All of our bounds extend to the colored version: Let be a list of triples in such that , but if are not all equal. ...