Author: Kowalski

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

The greatness of Serge Blanco

All unbiased observers agree that Rugby is the greatest of all team sports. Unbelievers should need no more than one look at this video to be convinced: a whole minute of play without interruption, ranging over the (large) field from one end to the other (both in length and width), ending with a try scored by the great Serge Blanco after ten or eleven players on his team touched the ball. This was during the last minute of the semifinal of the first Rugby World Cup, in 1987, between Australia and France (the French, having won this game to almost general surprise, rather characteristically lost the final game againt New Zealand).

One possible problem with Rugby is that it may be considered to be a bit on the violent side. It’s not quite as bad as suggested by Astérix chez les Bretons:

but it is sometimes a bit scary to see three or four fast and powerful players running towards the gallant arrière as he positions himself to catch the ball falling after a big parabolic kick (une chandelle, as we say in French), knowing that the rules allow them to do most anything to take it back — it is not permitted to jump at his throat, or to catch him in midair, but as soon as he has his feet back on the ground…

Name-dropping

Having just sent the title

Erdös-Kác, Rényi-Turán, Keating-Snaith, and Katz-Sarnak

for a lecture at a forthcoming conference, I was naturally led to wonder about the marvelous English expression name-dropping, and I resorted to the OED for information. I was surprised to see that the word is claimed to go back no further than the 1940’s; in fact the first quotation is for name-dropper:

1939 Los Angeles Times 17 Jan. 115/5 My pet aversion..is the name dropper, the type that is always saying: ‘Well,..when I had lunch with the P. of W., he said-’ I say to them: ‘The P. of What?’ ‘The P. of W., the Prince of Wales, of course,’ they say.

The first instance of name-dropping is in 1945; a nice quotation from 1999 is

1999 Times 16 July 24/7 Name-dropping is so vulgar, as I was telling the Queen last week.

Considering that the phenomenon certainly goes back to the dawns of celebrity (there must have been some name-droppers in philosophical circles in Ancient Greece), it’s a surprise to see it acquire its specific name so recently. And most languages probably don’t even have a good equivalent; I would certainly be hard put to give a good translation of name-dropping in French. Are there other languages better suited to the task?

The Verbania Conference

I was last week in Verbania, Italy, for the conference in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Riemann Hypothesis, which was also the inaugural activity of the new RISM (Riemann International School of Mathematics). It was a very pleasant occasion. Already during the Sunday afternoon presentation (open to a general audience), there was a beautiful historical lecture by R. Narasimhan, who explained in particular that “monodromy” was invented by Riemann, in a course on hypergeometric functions which barely escaped being forgotten: only three students attended it, two of whom dropped after a few lectures, and the last one publicly stated (years later) that he hadn’t understood a word of what Riemann was saying, but had stayed because his father (or maybe someone else: I have forgotten this detail) had told him that Riemann was the new man in mathematics, and that he should follow his lectures… Which he did, taking faithful notes — though he did so in a special type of shorthand which almost made them useless a few years later when time came to transcribe them.

The main lectures were especially pleasant (for me at least) in areas of geometry which I am not usually involved with: learning the current state of the art in an interesting field of mathematics can be quite a bit more enlightening if it comes from two or three hours of lectures coming from real experts (especially if there are opportunities to discuss any question afterwards). So I particularly liked the short course by J-P. Demailly, the one by J. Cheeger, and the two lectures by C. Voisin, who explained very clearly the current knowledge of both the topological constraints for Kähler varieties (what is apparently called the “Kodaira problem”), and what is currently the best that is understood about the notorious Hodge conjecture.

The slides of many lectures can be found on a page of the conference web site, and others will be posted soon (including mine; the beamer presentation can already be downloaded here).

The conference was all the more enjoyable due to the very pleasant setting by the shore of the Lago Maggiore, and although the weather was not uniformly good, the best day was Wednesday, when the excursion to the Borromean Islands was organized. The quality of the organization can be seen from the rather fancy notebook that was given to participants at the beginning: