2015 Ig Nobel Prizes

The 2015 Ig Nobel Prizes have now been announced.

(Georgia Tech people took home the physics prize for their work on urination duration, and I also noticed a Somervillian as one of the recipients in the prize for diagnostic medicine. Also, the economics and mathematics prizes are fantastic.)

What Happens in Atlanta Stays in Atlanta (2013 Edition)

I am off on a trip to several places on the east coast of the US. My first stop is Atlanta, where I will be giving a talk in Georgia Tech's math department and then going to Dragon Con for some geekery and gaming (and geekery and fantasy ... and yet more geekery).

Mamma Mia!

Georgia Tech astronomers have found a new planet that seems to be made of diamond.

One has to go to the original paper to find this, but the same scientists also report what appear to be red plumber outfits on that planet. One of the scientists also claims to have heard muted words that sounded something like "Mamma mia!"

(Tip of the cap to the Georgia Tech Department of Physics.)

Website Legacy

Many years ago, when I was a postdoc in Georgia Tech's math department, I kept track of the talks in the seminar series that I was organizing on an excruciating simple website. I did this because the math department didn't have a good central site for seminars at the time.

During my postdoc, a person who was organizing our PDE seminar asked me for my .html code, which I gladly sent. Many years later, this code is still being used. The original person didn't think to delete the Sitemeter tick at the bottom that incremented the count for visits to my websites. And, many years later, that still remains as well.

However, I am significantly prouder of the legacy on this page, which is the graduate student seminar series that I started at Cornell in Fall 2000. Now it's 10 years later, and my seminar is still running. And the text on the website that describes the series is almost exactly the text that I wrote originally.

(In case you're interested, I wrote an opinion piece about it that appeared in 2002 in the Notices of the AMS.)

Georgia Tech math account: officially dead

As of today (or possibly yesterday, which is the day I was told this would happen), my Georgia Tech math department account is now officially dead. Some people may still try e-mailing me there, but I won't get any of those messages any more. Also, all the nice pictures I had posted there are now no longer posted (and the number of hits on my websites has concomitantly gone down -- of course, the hits I get now have a much higher probability of being academic ones).

Now, I'm going to remove the links to those pages that I have on my Caltech website. I might repost some of this stuff eventually, but I'm not going to bother until after I flee to England.

I did repost the picture of me in the giant flower because I wanted a picture to show up on blogger. (The sudden absence of this picture from my blogger profile is how I realized the axe had officially fallen.)

I moved a couple things over to my Caltech account (such as my introduction to LaTeX, which a lot of people actually use), but because of the very limited space I have (and the fact that I use most of it already), older papers will just have to not be available from my website until I move to Oxford and have more room to post them. Moreover, my 'research' webpage was well-organized when I first wrote it, but it's gained a lot of entropy as I have advised more students, undertaken more projects, and written more papers. It needs to be completely rewritten (and my site needs to be reorganized as well), though because I'm a lame duck at the moment, I'm just going to leave my ITS site as is and start from scratch when I move to Oxford. (I really don't want to spend the time to do this at the moment, so I'll do this as part of setting up the OCD group webpage.)