Michi’s blog

Eric Finster, over at Curious Reasoning has built a python script to allow you to write WordPress posts entirely in LaTeX , and upload them. The script parses the LaTeX code and generates HTML that expresses the same structure.

This, here, is me trying it out. With any luck, the appearance of a new toy will get me back to actually blogging some more – it’s been winding down a bit much here lately.

I seem, lately, to be so densely planned that all I can do for my blog is to react on blog posts from Ben Webster at the Secret Blogging Seminar.

He has, recently, written a post inspired by the xkcd comic on purity in the sciences. The comic is funny, and rings true, but Ben brings up a severe criticism of the premises of the comic that rings back to my own years as a hotheaded undergraduate.

You should read all of Ben’s post, but if you don’t, you should at least read the following:

I like the Mathjobs website that AMS are running. It’s a good source for math jobs, and seems to have just the right selection for me to get interesting stuff out of reading it.

Now, in a post just a day or two ago, Ben Webster of the Secret Blogging Seminar called for RSS feeds for the Mathjobs listings.

Imagine my surprise – and probably that of most the readers of the Secret Blogging seminar – to see, the day after posting, the following reply from Diane Boumenot at the AMS:

Hello all. First of all let me say, thank you for the kind words. Also, if you want to send suggestions to Mathjobs.Org, that can be easily done through the web site. However, thanks to Google Alerts and a willing programmer, your request has been received and acted on. As of this morning you can get an RSS feed through the View Jobs page of the Mathjobs website.

From each month, the first sentence of the first post.

January: I decided on a whim to look in at the Dilbertblog, where the top post at the moment has Scott Adams calling all atheists that discuss on the net irrational, using a rather neat strawman carbon copy of most discussions of faith between believers (i.e. mostly Christians) and atheists he has seen on the web.

February: The second carnival of mathematics is up over at Good Math, Bad Math.

March: I just met up with the workgroup in the Deutsche Mathematikervereinigung (German Association of Mathematicians) with interest spanning “Information and Communication” – which turns out to mean that they care about libraries, about communicative tools for mathematicians, and spend their time thinking about these things, and meeting at conferences.

April: The website/forumsite Mathetreff, run by the Bezirksregierung (region government) Düsseldorf, just performed a mail interview with me.

In a recent column at The Chronicle of Higher Education, the columnist writes

I’m a latecomer to it, in part because I have a very hit-or-miss interest in new technologies. (I still don’t own a cell phone, for example, though I check my e-mail 4,000 times a day.)

Now. There are 24 hours in a day. 1 440 minutes. 86 400 seconds. Thus, checking e-mail 4 000 times in a day would require you to check your inbox every 21.6 seconds. Day and night.

Either the author is innumerate or hyperactive.

… or another bout of more-or-less shameless self-promotion.

I took the initiative, and invited some of the relevant Powers That Be to start an -themed group blog: The Infinite Seminar.

I also perceived a lack of blog aggregators, so I started Planet Math Blogseminars to aggregate group blogs in mathematics.

While I was at it, I bought the blogseminar.net domain. I’d be happy to allocate subdomains of this to decent enough blogs that wants in on it.

The new carnival of mathematics is up over at PolyMathematics.
Yours truly is featured, but other than that, there seems to be heavy overweight on the educator side.

Do we have the volume for a Carnival of Research Mathematics?

ComplexZeta asked me about the origins of my intuitions for homological algebra in my recent post. The answer got a bit lengthy, so I’ll put it in a post of its own.

I find Weibel very readable – once the interest is there. It’s a good reference, and not as opaque as, for instance, the MacLane + Hilton-Stammbach couplet can be at points.

The interest, however, is something I blame my alma mater for. Once upon a time, Jan-Erik Roos went to Paris and studied with Grothendieck. When he got back, he got a professorship at Stockholm University without having finished his PhD. He promptly made sure that nowadays (when he’s an Emeritus stalking the halls) there is not a single algebraist at Stockholm University without some sort of intuition for homological algebra.

They simply do not end. Now, Cornell grads and pre-grads have started the Everything Seminar – which has absolutely brilliant discussions about the forbidden minor theorem in graph theory as well as a fascinating overview over constructing homological algebra as embedded in the theory of modules over .

Connected to this comes the observation that by constructing calculus using the tricks used in synthetic differential geometry, we end up with – again – modules over , and some very fascinating discussions are sparked as to subtle and interesting connections between these two viewpoints!

How on earth I am going to keep up with the interesting sprouting discussion group blogs I shall never know. Maybe it’s getting to the point where we’ll start an -blog?

Is now up at Math Notations. The current host further suggests a split in undergrad+ and undergrad- categories – with the simpler and didactics focused posts in one carnival and the research and/or advanced mathematical posts in another. Personally, I think the momentum the carnival has is a good thing, and that a split should wait until we habitually turn away more posts than we’re comfortable with. This volume is not yet actually there – wherefore I’d be against a split.

Enjoy.

right here – at least if you’re wondering what happened with my recent interview.

All the cool kids are doing it, so I’ll tag in too.

There’s a secret blogging seminar going on. And the people seem to be writing interesting things – what little they managed to write before the hushed rumour mill started.

The website/forumsite Mathetreff, run by the Bezirksregierung (region government) Düsseldorf, just performed a mail interview with me.

Here it is, translated to english, for your enjoyment.

MT: Dear Mr. Johansson, you are an expert on mathematics blogs. Thus first off a double question: What is a blog, and what do you do in your algebra blog?

MJ: A blog, or weblog as the name started, is basically just a comfortable way to publish texts sequentially on the web. As such blogs aren’t much more than websites with administration aids. The interesting starts when you involve interactions – comments on the texts or easy linking between different blogs.

For this, there are both many different blog softwares, that make these aspects easy accessible and automated, and many websites that network blogs. Thus, it happens that farreaching blog debates occur, where through a networking site several blog discuss or even fight over some question.

Over at Alon’s place, Abstract Nonsense, the first issue of the forthnightly Carnival of Mathematics is up.

Go there. Read. There’s a LOT of good blog posts there.

The Community College Dean has written about why he blogs, and asks any and all readers to tack on to his effort.

My blog is not very anonymous. It is occasionally personal, occasionally political and throughout a venting location for thoughts, and a place where I formulate myself in higher detail – so to speak a scratchpad, but public enough for me to allow others to read it.

I write it to formulate my own thoughts further, find possible errors, start discussions, or just jot down the viewpoints that illuminated some point of some argument for me. I do it in public because I thouroughly enjoy the conversations it sparks.