MSI at the Institute

Last Saturday evening, in Wolfensohn Hall at the Institute for Advanced Study, was held the first semi-staged reading of the mathematical screenplay “MSI: Anatomy”, written by Jennifer Granville and her brother Andrew Granville (with original music by R. Schneider and stage design by M. Spencer).

I won’t even try here to summarize or describe the story (but I will say that it was a great success), being no media critic and hardly an expert on mathematical detective fiction (a proper review by V. Miller will appear, I am told, in the Notices of the AMS), but I am happy to mention that most of the mathematics discussed can also be found in Granville’s very entertaining survey on analogies between integers and permutations. I am also told that efforts to present the story to a wider audience are in progress…

Here is the poster:

And here is a picture taken by C.J. Mozzochi at the beginning of the performance; the blackboards, besides pictures of cheese, include excerpts of excellent mathematics, some of which faithffully reproduced from B. Green’s lecture (given two days before) on his work with T. Tao and T. Ziegler on the inverse conjecture for Gowers norms:

(I apologize for not including the name of the fine actors involved: I have misplaced my copy of the programme, where they are listed, but I will update the post once it is found again — such a simple act of detection should be within my feeble means…)

Euler for a third day, or: the second Euler product for zeta

(For those who missed them, the first day was about π, and the the second day was about ζ(2); what will the third day reveal… read on!).

According to Hadamard’s factorization for the “completed” zeta function

$latex \xi(s)=s(s-1)\pi^{-s/2}\Gamma(s/2)\zeta(s)$

(which is an entire function of s, and is invariant under the replacement of s by 1-s), we can write

$latex \xi(s)=e^{a+bs}\prod_{\rho}{\Bigl(1-\frac{s}{\rho}\Bigr)e^{s/\rho}},$

where the product runs over all non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function (those in the critical strip), and a and b are some constants.

Now, as in Euler’s original definition of the Gamma function, it is tempting to replace the exponential terms by

$latex (1-1/\rho)^{-s},$

which leads to

$latex \xi(s)=\Delta^s e^{a+bs}\prod_{\rho}{\Bigl(1-\frac{s}{\rho}\Bigr)\Bigl(1-\frac{1}{\rho}\Bigr)^{-s}},$

with

$latex \Delta=\prod_{\rho}{e^{1/\rho}(1-1/\rho)}.$

(All these products converge absolutely for all s since the series with general term |ρ|2 converges). Now, since

$latex \xi(0)=\xi(1)=1$,

(easily remembered because the zeta function has a simple pole with residue 1 at s=1), we can plug in the value s=0 and s=1 to get

$latex 1=e^a,\quad\quad 1=\Delta e^b,$

which leads to what may be anachronistically called Euler’s second product for the Riemann zeta function:

$latex \xi(s)=\prod_{\rho}{\Bigl(1-\frac{s}{\rho}\Bigr)\Bigl(1-\frac{1}{\rho}\Bigr)^{-s}}$

(I have never seen this formula before, but of course it is very unlikely to be new!)

One may even mix this with Euler’s gamma formula

$latex \frac{1}{\Gamma(1+z)}=\prod_{k\geq 1}{\Bigl(1+\frac{z}{k}\Bigr)\Bigl(1+\frac{1}{k}\Bigr)^{-z}}$

and the well-known value Γ(1/2)=π1/2, which together give the nice expression

$latex \pi^{-s/2}\Gamma(s/2)=\frac{2^{1-s}}{s}\prod_{k\geq 1}{\Bigl(1+\frac{s}{2k}\Bigr)^{-1}\Bigl(1+\frac{1}{2k}\Bigr)^{-s}}$

from which we can incorporate the trivial zeros of the zeta function at -2, -4, -6, etc, in the product, and deduce

$latex \zeta(s)=\frac{2^{1-s}}{s-1}\prod_{\rho}{\Bigl(1-\frac{s}{\rho}\Bigr)\Bigl(1-\frac{1}{\rho}\Bigr)^{-s}}$

where the product runs now over trivial and non-trivial zeros!

Now, it is more than tempting to specialize the value of s; the first formula, for s=2, leads to

$latex \xi(2)=2\pi^{-1}\Gamma(1)\zeta(2)=\prod_{\rho}{\Bigl(1-\frac{2}{\rho}\Bigr)\Bigl(1-\frac{1}{\rho}\Bigr)^{-2}},$

or in other words to the relation

$latex \frac{\pi}{3}=\prod_{\rho}{\Bigl(1-\frac{1}{(\rho-1)^2}\Bigr)}$

where the product is — once more — over non-trivial zeros. Again, I would bet this has already appeared somewhere, but I had never seen it.

Using the table of the first 10000 positive ordinates of zeros of zeta (found here), one gets (putting in the complex conjugates, of course) the values

$latex 1.02737,\quad 1.04070,\quad 1.04569,\quad 1.04692$

with the first 10, 100, 1000 and 10000 zeros, respectively, compared with π/3=1.04720.

Found! (very probably…)

I think I’ve found the mysterious author of the notes on 3-manifolds: it is (or should be) G. P. Scott. The crucial clue is the fact that the notes claim that the author, and Shalen independently, proved that “3-manifold groups are coherent”, and then gives the proof. This would immediately clarify things, were it not for the fact that (1) Shalen never published his proof; (2) the terminology “coherent” doesn’t seem to be really well known for groups, really. What it is defined to mean is the following: a group G is coherent if and only if, all its finitely generated subgroups are finitely presented.

But, as it happens, even Scott’s paper proving this doesn’t seem to use the terminology! (In MathSciNet, there are ten papers by someone named Scott including “coherent” somewhere in the review — but again that one is not among them) Fortunately, Google did find some references for “Shalen coherent”, in particular a Bourbaki seminar by J. Stallings reporting on Scott’s result (which gives, in particular, simple examples of non-coherent groups).

[Note: On Scott’s page, I found what seems to be a quite nice survey of The geometries of 3-manifolds, from 1983.]

The mystery lecture notes

As long as written texts remain an important part of mathematics, we can expect that — every once in a while — boxes or bins will appear in a common room, or in a library, or outside some retiring professor’s office, with an enticing “Please take” or Servez-vous to encourage the random walker (or flâneur, or Spaziergänger) to pick up some old preprint or other. Thanks to such open-ended generosity, my own collection has been enriched by an old textbook I’ve already discussed, a fair number of Bourbaki Seminar reprints, and a few mimeographed reprints from André Weil’s own collection (also, a somewhat melancholy sight, an italian translation of his sister’s play Venise sauvée, or “Venice saved”), including lecture notes of Siegel, de Rham and papers of Serre and Ihara, with a few (unfortunately rather benign) marginal notes.

Monday last week, as I was at the University of Pennsylvania (to give a lecture in their Algebra and Galois Theory seminar — video accessible from Ted Chinburg’s web page…), I found a few such inviting bins in the common room. I quickly picked up what seems to be a very nice set of lecture notes (or survey?) of 3-manifold topology, dating apparently from the mid-seventies. In particular, it being typewritten (or xeroxed from a typewritten original), I grabbed it with especial promptness, thinking that this might well be a text that is not really available anywhere else.

However, I can’t quite confirm this because there is no indication of the author’s name, either at the beginning or at the end of the set of notes. Googling the first sentence (“The basic problem of manifold theory is that of classification”) didn’t bring any hit. But maybe some readers will recognize it? Here’s a picture of the first page, for all 3-detectives…

On title multiplicity

While looking with Google for the precise reference to the paper of Ingham (which K. Soundararajan had helpfully pointed out) which is mentioned in this comment to my earlier post, it transpired that the title “A note on Fourier transforms” is not really univoque (as people used to say before “injective” became the fashion): there are at least five distinct papers with the exact same title (MathSciNet only finds two of them, because the others — including Ingham’s — were published too early to appear in that database, but Google scholar found them, missing however the one of H. Kober in 1944). Since all are in the Journal (or Bulletin) of the London Mathematical Society, there’s of course a small chance that there are other papers with this title, hidden somewhere.

But in any case, I wonder what is the mathematical title which occurs with highest multiplicity? Who has an example with more than five?