Random CIRM happenings

I was last week at the conference on “Number theory and its applications” which was excellently organized by C. Delaunay and F.X. Roblot at the CIRM conference center, close to Marseille. Although I don’t have last year’s excuse at the end of the Joint Math Meetings, my remarks will be just as incoherent…

  • M. Watkins showed a book he recently bought in the Canary Islands, which proves that G. Perelman is on his way to becoming a pop-culture figure:

    A cursory look at the content (though not by native Spanish speakers!) does not seem to suggest that this a serious work of mathematical scholarship…
  • For the future writer of the definitive history of analytic number theory, I offer this remark from É. Fouvry, who said one could quote him:

    … et Chebychev arrive avec une astuce de voleur de mobylette… (…and then Chebychev comes around with a trick worthy of a bicycle thief)

  • Charles Boyd, an enterprising soul worthy of homeric epithets, has ported Pari/GP to android

    The package can be downloaded here. There’s something confortable in having your phone factor the 8-th Fermat number during a post-dinner round-wine discussion… One may object that, at the moment, any syntax error causes the program to exit unceremoniously, but certainly this will soon improve. (Note: the broken screen was not caused by Paridroid…)

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Kowalski

I am a professor of mathematics at ETH Zürich since 2008.

One thought on “Random CIRM happenings”

  1. A native Spanish speaker suggests (based on five minutes spent with the book in Luminy) that it is a very pretentious thriller by a young writer (or a shallow novel with pretensions of being a thriller, by the same).

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