AMS Open Math Notes

When I was attending the conference in honor of Alex Lubotzky’s 60th birthday, Karen Vogtmann, who was also there, told me of the Open Math Notes repository, a new project of the AMS that she was involved with. This is meant to be a collection of (mostly) lecture notes, such as many mathematicians write for a course, but which are not published (nor necessarily meant to be published). So they can be incomplete, they might contain mistakes, and may more generally be subject to all the slings and arrows that mathematical writing is heir to. (See the web site for more information, submission guidelines, etc…)

I think that this is a great idea, and am very happy that, as the web site is now public, two of my own lecture notes can be found among the inaugural set! The highlight of the current selection is however undoubtedly “A singular mathematical promenade”, by Étienne Ghys, his beautiful book on graphs of polynomials, Newton’s method, Puiseux expansions, divergent series, and much much else that I have yet to see (I’m only one-third through looking at it…)

Hopefully, the Open Math Notes collection will grow to contain many further texts. The example of the book of Ghys is already an illustration of how useful this may be — although it is also available on his home page, one doesn’t necessarily visit it frequently enough to notice it…

Two final whimsical remarks to conclude: (1) among the six authors currently represented [Update (four hours later): this has already changed!], three [Update: four] (at least) are French; (2) one of my set of notes promises a randonnée, and Ghys’s book is a promenade — clearly, one can think of mathematics as a journey…

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Kowalski

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

3 thoughts on “AMS Open Math Notes”

    1. Not really fancy, it was the WordPress default theme for 2015 (it seems to use slightly larger fonts that are more readable on my laptop and on my phone, at least…)

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