Author Archives: Persiflage

Midlife crisis

Posted on February 12, 2024 by Persiflage

Plein Air is certainly the best cafe in Hyde Park. (Arguably Build Coffee is fine as well, but they are only open about 5 hours a week.) But it is also true to say that Plein Air is (at best) … Continue reading →

Posted in Coffee | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The horizontal Breuil-Mezard conjecture

Posted on October 19, 2023 by Persiflage

Postdoc hiring season will be upon us soon! I have two excellent graduate students who will be applying for academic jobs soon, Chengyang Bao and Andreea Iorga. I have mentioned Chengyang’s first project before here and an introduction to the … Continue reading →

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Magma Instability

Posted on October 13, 2023 by Persiflage

I had occasion to return to some magma scripts I wrote in 2012. I the script used a number of pre-computed auxiliary files with computations, and was a little complicated, but didn’t use anything particularly complicated. So I was really … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Clozel 70, Part II

Posted on September 30, 2023 by Persiflage

Many years ago, Khare asked me (as I think he asked many others at the time) whether I believed their existed an irreducible motive \(M\) over \(\mathbf{Z}\) (so good reduction everywhere) with Hodge-Tate weights \([0,1,2,\ldots,n-1]\) for any \(n > 1\). … Continue reading →

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Clozel 70, Part I

Posted on September 24, 2023 by Persiflage

I recently returned home from a trip to Paris for Clozel’s 70th birthday conference. Naturally I stayed in an airbnb downtown, and the RER B gods smiled on me with a hassle free commute for the entire week. Tekés was … Continue reading →

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Kouign-Amann, Chicago Tasting

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Persiflage

A free morning on the north side this week meant a chance for a bike ride and a new cafe; nothing out of the ordinary. But this time I prepared an itinerary to hit up some of the most highly … Continue reading →

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Haebler and Gilberto

Posted on June 8, 2023 by Persiflage

Two obituaries in the NYT within one week for musicians in my music collection. I can’t quite say that Mozart is my composer of choice, especially when it comes to the piano, although I could listen to Mitsuko Uchida play … Continue reading →

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Google and Franck

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Persiflage

I have a google play (which plays streaming music) and it’s really terrible for classical music. If you choose virtually any piece of classical music and then flip forward three songs you invariably end up with Claire de Lune or … Continue reading →

Posted in Music | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Quadratic Reciprocity

Posted on May 2, 2023 by Persiflage

I accidentally proved quadratic reciprocity in class today, or at least three quarters of a proof. Can you finish it off? Here’s the proof: start with a real quadratic field \(K\), and the sequence \(1 \rightarrow \mathcal{O}^{\times}_K \rightarrow K^{\times} \rightarrow … Continue reading →

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En Passant VIII

Posted on April 28, 2023 by Persiflage

Coffee in Hyde Park: I had the misfortune of being stuck in down town Hyde Park needing a coffee without access to a car. I started at Sip and Savour where I ordered a cortado. They did not know what … Continue reading →

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