Posted by Martin Orr on
Sunday, 07 December 2008 at 20:07
Term has just finished and it's been hard work so I have had no time to post all the way through. At the end of term, I gave a talk on Kummer theory (a bit of Galois theory - you can read the abstract) as part of the Part III seminar series. My talk was fairly easy, intended to fill in some stuff that was assumed in the Part III Local Fields lectures but not included in Part II Galois Theory. None of the number theory talks provoked many questions afterwards.
Out of the seminars I attended (although these were only on one day out of 2.5) the number theory seminars had the largest audience, twenty-something; this included a significant proportion of PhD students and academic staff, while the others (category theory and differential geometry) were mostly attended by Part III students.
Tags
partiii, talk
Posted by Martin Orr on
Thursday, 16 October 2008 at 22:11
We've had almost a week of lectures now. I have fairly definitely committed to Algebraic Number Theory. It's getting a bit hard to describe the courses I'm doing now, so here's just a list with a few comments:
- Local Fields (central to number theory)
- Arithmetic of Abelian Varieties (algebraic number theory; this is a graduate course, so goes pretty fast)
- Algebraic Geometry (these ideas underlie a lot of algebraic number theory)
- Commutative Algebra (the algebraic techniques needed for all the above)
- Differential Geometry
- Finite-dimensional Lie Algebras and their Representations
The last two are less directly important for number theory, and are just for fun. Six courses is too much work, so I need to drop one of those two, but I don't know which. These courses are all significantly harder than last year.
The Cambridge Lindy Exchange starts tomorrow evening, so I'll be pretty busy with that all weekend. I'm also trying to get together some organised accounts for the Lindy Hoppers.
Tags
lindy, partiii
Posted by Martin Orr on
Thursday, 02 October 2008 at 19:13
I have been studying category theory recently, and revising my idea of what a group is. There are two ways of thinking about groups, which I shall call active and passive. I have tended to almost exclusively think about groups passively, but I have realised that treating groups as active is useful too.
Tags
groups, maths
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Posted by Martin Orr on
Tuesday, 30 September 2008 at 13:26
Another while with no post, reflecting the quiet nature of life in Belfast (although I do have a partially written mathematical post). I have produced a website for Grass Roots Conservation Group; and I've been studying Miranda's Algebraic Curves and Riemann Surfaces (an unusual approach to the subject I think) and Mac Lane's Categories for the Working Mathematician (which leaves me feeling that I know the formal stuff but not the reasons why).
I managed to find some swing in Belfast. It's a pretty small scene, and the girls were quite happy to have a new lead. Muriel's, where people gather on Thursday nights, has room for about three couples to dance, which is plenty. A teacher has recently started beginners classes (broader swing more than lindy) on Tuesdays in McHugh's.
I spent the weekend at the Edinburgh Lindy Exchange, a much bigger dancing experience, and now feel like I've had plenty for a while. After that, I'm back in Cambridge and there is lots to be done now in preparing for the Cambridge Lindy Exchange for which we've had lots more bookings following ELX.
Tags
lindy, travel, website
Posted by Martin Orr on
Monday, 18 August 2008 at 14:34
My final night was spent in Cherbourg, from where I got the ferry back to Rosslare. I had most of a day in Cherbourg, but because I had to lug my big rucksack around with me I wasn't able to do very much. I wanted to visit the museum of the sea, with centrepiece a decommissioned nuclear submarine, but there was nowhere I could leave the rucksack. So I just wandered around, enjoyed being near the sea and sat in the ferry terminal - which, like the Stena terminal in Belfast, didn't really feel like it was designed to be walked to.
Tags
france, holiday