Intermezzo

Scholze is giving a course at Berkeley! Follow Jared Weinstein’s lecture notes from the course here.

I believe that the lectures are also being recorded and will be available approximately one week after each lecture; I will add a link when it becomes available. Added: Chandan Dalawat in the comments gives the following link.

On a different matter, it was reported to me that it was “common knowledge” amongst graduate students at a certain bay area university that “Sowa the Owl” (Сова = Owl) was in fact Andrei Suslin. I can safely confirm that is almost definitively not the case; Suslin, for one, doesn’t use email. In fact, the only way to talk to him at all is to ambush him outside his algebra class at 1:58. On this matter, I will otherwise confine my remarks to the following:

Consider a “Gowers Colloquium” which consisted of Gowers giving a talk once a week on a topic chosen by the colloquium organizer. Then I wager (and the bar is unfortunately low here) that it would be a more informative and interesting lecture series than the math colloquiums at most universities. (Although that $2000 dinner I had at Harvest restaurant after a Harvard colloquium was pretty nice; we drank a few bottles of decent Chablis, if I remember.) More generally, I think mathematicians talking about work that is not their own (in a seminar/colloquium setting) is not done enough in mathematics. Can anyone tell me how succesfull the Bourbaki seminar is as an actual seminar talk? I worry that speakers might try too hard to impress Serre, I’m not sure.