{"id":4711,"date":"2015-09-13T16:48:40","date_gmt":"2015-09-13T14:48:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpethzprd.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/?p=4711"},"modified":"2024-02-20T13:40:33","modified_gmt":"2024-02-20T11:40:33","slug":"ventotene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/2015\/09\/13\/ventotene\/","title":{"rendered":"Ventotene"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just came back from a week on the Italian island of Ventotene<\/a>, where I participated in a very nice conference on “Manifolds and groups”<\/a>. This is of course not my usual topic, and besides giving a minicourse on expanders and coverings (with a focus on geometric applications of expanders having to do with coverings…), I learnt a lot of interesting things. I particularly enjoyed the other two minicourses, by T. Gelander on invariant random subgroups and by R. Sauer on L\u00fccks’s Approximation Theorem. (For both of these, as well as for a number of other talks, the slides are available on the conference web page; my own — handwritten — notes on my course should appear there soon, after I scan them).<\/p>\n

Being an island, Ventotene is reached by boat. One of the interesting things about the trip to Ventotene was to observe how birds<\/p>\n

\"Birds\"<\/a>
Birds<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

would follow us until a very definite point, and then suddenly disappear.<\/p>\n

Also, the instructions to launch a lifeboat are rather daunting…<\/p>\n

\"Lifeboat\"<\/a>
Lifeboat<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The organizers had scheduled a lot of free time during the conference besides the scientific programme. I was therefore able to take a few pictures, such as some of the local lizards,<\/p>\n

\"Lizard\"<\/a>
Lizard<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

and some of the wonderful local cats.<\/p>\n

\"Cat\"<\/a>
Cat<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The end of the week also coincided with the beginning of the ten-day long celebration of the island’s patron saint, Santa Candida<\/a>. Among the festivities were the evening launches<\/p>\n

\"Balloon\"<\/a>
Balloon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

(over a week) of huge hot-air balloons (“Mongolfieri”), with some fireworks<\/p>\n

\"Fireworks\"<\/a>
Fireworks<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

(note the amusing effects of my camera’s fireworks scene setting without tripod…). Some Galois-theoretic persiflage<\/a> was also notable…<\/p>\n

\"Persiflage\"<\/a>
Persiflage<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Update<\/b> The scans of my lectures can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just came back from a week on the Italian island of Ventotene, where I participated in a very nice conference on “Manifolds and groups”. This is of course not my usual topic, and besides giving a minicourse on expanders and coverings (with a focus on geometric applications of expanders having to do with coverings…), … Continue reading Ventotene<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":625,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[157,2,113],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eth","category-blogroll","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/625"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}