I’ve cleaned-up my list of publications and unpublished notes, moving in the second page some preprints that are not going to be submitted for publication (as well as two notes that I had not yet put online).
On February 1st, I’ll start a period of being vice-chairman for two years and a half, then chairman of the department for two years, so that my other activities are unlikely to flourish for a long time, and similarly this blog will be updated even less regularly than before.
Two days ago, in the evening, I finished reading “Der Zauberberg” in German. I had started in early June, a bit before the previous post, so it took about seven months. This is comparable to the time it took me to read Proust, but it is certainly the longest time I’ve spent reading (without long interruptions) a single work. Much of this reading was done in the tramway, using heavily the Leo app and it’s excellent English-German dictionary to get through the more philosophical parts (I was told by friends who saw me sometimes that I was particularly absorbed…)
And although I had claimed that I wouldn’t buy a second copy, I actually did get one (second hand, from a 1926 printing) to have one
where the French dialogue in the crucial Walpurgisnacht scene is not translated (in modern German editions, such as that of the GFKA, these parts are printed as in the original text within the main body of the novel, but a translation is appended at the end of the book). By the way, I learnt from the Kommentar that Thomas Mann wrote the French dialogue directly in French (not in German that he would later translate), but that they were re-read and corrected by a more fluent friend.
I was very saddened to read on T. Tao’s blog of the death of Elias Stein. Although I did not know him personally, or even worked in the same area of mathematics, I felt a great admiration and respect for him. I remember browsing intently through some of his books, especially at the beginning of my PhD thesis, but also still in recent times, and especially the one (partly) about quasi-orthogonality. I tried to apply one of the statements I found there (“Cotlar’s Lemma”) to some cases of large-sieve inequalities. It didn’t work, but I remember that during a party at Fine Hall some time later, my advisor H. Iwaniec introduced me to Stein (this was my only personal encounter with him!) by saying jokingly that “Your lemma is not strong enough”.
I have always felt a great attraction to the type of harmonic analysis that I read about in those books, even if I don’t understand it. Maybe, one day, I will be able to know more…
The registration for the Winter School on trace functions at Monte Verità can now begin. As explained on the web page, because the number of participants is limited, you should send an email to this address to indicate your interest. For the most part, the school is for PhD students, so please indicate who is your PhD advisor, and if you are a postdoc, your motivation for attending the school.
We will then send to the selected participants the link to the official registration page.
Like every year, the mathematics department of ETH offers some postdoc positions. This year, a slightly different organization has been chosen, combining some resources with the FIM. The positions are now called “Hermann Weyl Instructors”, and the main change (besides slightly earlier deadlines) is that the teaching duties are clearly stated upfront: the postdoc should teach 50% during two semesters of the three year position. (So if we compare with the Veblen Instructorships offered by Princeton and the IAS, for example, we request one year teaching/two year research, instead of two year teaching/one year research for the Veblen position).
The web page with information on the positions (including salary, which follows a standard ETH scale) is available on the FIM website. The deadline for application is November 1 (for full consideration — slightly later applications are permitted, but depending on the schedule of the committee meetings, they might be too late). Finally, the application can be done using this form.