I always felt there ought to be a good theory of p-adic random matrices paralleling the very-well-worked out real and complex story. I wrote a paper years ago with Jain and Venkatesh that proposed …

A great novel if you like murder, sex between men, grudges, West Virginia, and long sentences. “His eyes were as bright as ever, perhaps brighter, the disc of the pupil appearing to move like…

My colleage Sameer Deshpande, together with Shekhar Shah, and Paul Nguyen are doing Badgers on Tap Wednesday night 9/9 at 6:30pm at One Social Food Hall downtown; there will be talk about post-Mone…

Interesting developments tonight, as Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster announce that after a fair amount of work they have constructed examples of finite-time blowup for a broad class of PDEs in…

I’m well underway on revising Don’t Be Too Sure, which I finished a first draft of right before surgery. A lot of people make appearances in this book, most of all William James and Joh…

A couple of new videos of me talking to people, which feature some themes that are going to be in Don’t Be Too Sure, as well as some stuff I’ve written about before. Both of these are l…

Yes, I was there! The craziest game I’ve ever seen. Seattle utility infielder Leo Rivas throwing 40mph eephus after 40mph eephus, the closest I will ever get to seeing what it would look like…

Hello, loyal readers! My shoulder has been repaired. All went smoothly, though the operation was substantially longer than expected, because what do you know, there were three tendons torn, not jus…

At least it wasn’t the Yankees. Yes, Adley Rutchman, an Oriole yesterday, is a Red Sock today. Not much to say about it that hasn’t been said over the last 20 hours. I understand that h…

Correct outcome, but imagine if Argentina had won this on penalties without taking a single shot on goal in 120 minutes of actual play! That could easily have happened, and what an embarrassment. M…

I have trouble sleeping — trouble staying asleep, not trouble falling asleep. I have found that the best way to get back to sleep at three or four in the morning is to listen to a podcast on …

I was in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago with AB and we went to the brand-new Museum of the American Revolution.  It’s a great work of public history.  Every American, and everybody else w…

It is possible to open a a peanut butter jar one-handed; the trick is to grasp the jar between the knees and then twist with the left hand. However, I have not figured out how to get a knifeload of…

Yesterday I hit a pothole while biking up N. Allen St. and flew over my handlebars. Lying on the street, unable to get up, bleeding all over the asphalt. Several people stopped to help; one neighbo…

These are the notes from the recent Bourbaki seminar I gave about just some of the remarkable work people have done around the Cohen-Lenstra conjectures in the past few years. I have to submit the …

“Let’s hazard an assertion: On or about June 2007, human character changed. To be more exact—because the phrase human character now feels antique—we might say instead that the human sensorium…

A well-thought-out statement. One thing I like about it is that it is not in any way anti-AI; the declaration merely says that, as with any other piece of technology, we should use it in ways that …

Tomorrow is Memorial Day. William James, in 1897, dedicating the monument to Col. Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th regiment, a monument which still stands in Boston Common today: “And when Sout…

In the fall of 1992, my senior year of college, I took a seminar on Social Psychology of Language with Roger Brown. (Roger Brown the psychologist, not Roger Brown the painter, one of my very favori…

It was felt that the 1894 exposition in Chicago needed a big iron monument to rival the Eiffel Tower, and a man named George Washington Gale Ferris had the decisive insight that what the occasion d…

I was in Boston for Pesach and stuck around an extra day because some more Wisconsinites, the mighty Milwaukee Brewers, were also coming into town to play the Boston nine. CJ and I took in the game…

Twenty years ago this week (I thought it was twenty years ago today, but I just went back and checked and it was April 3, 2006) I fell down a flight of stairs at MSRI and broke the absolute fuck ou…

“The High School Boy and His Problems” (pdf at link) is a 1921 book by Thomas Arkle Clark, Dean of Men at the University of Illinois. I think “The High School Boy and His Problems…

While we ate our pizza I was talking with AB about differential equations, which they’re about to start doing in calculus. We talked about y’=y. “This is why populations grow expo…

Ben Recht’s book The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us comes out tomorrow! I was privileged to get my copy early. And if you want an opinionated, informed,…

It has come to my attention that students at prestigious universities are referring to the practice of cold-emailing alums of their school and asking for Zoom calls to discuss possible summer inter…

The Harvard faculty is proposing to hard-cap A’s at 20% per course, leading to an undergraduate crashout the good old Yard has not seen the likes of since,the dining hall discontinued the Chi…

Here’s a good use case for LLMs — they are quite good at recovering the text from files you saved on a Macintosh word processor in the early 90s and have been transporting from computer…

Barring any last-minute moves, and despite being linked to just about every big-name pitcher on the free-agent market, the Orioles will go into 2026 as they left 2025, without a clear #1 starter. D…

Surely people have thought about this but I couldn’t find anything on a short search. The question: let n be a random integer, say in [N,2N]. It factors as the product of p_i^a_i. So you can …

Dick Gross died last month. Much has already been written, and during his lifetime too, about his immense contributions to modern number theory. So I won’t try to cover that here — don&…

One of my favorite weather sayings. And I ran into a neighbor on my way home from the errand I was running so I got to say it in person, always a treat. 3 degrees Fahrenheit, sunny and windy in Mad…

“One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life, and it is therefore essential that they should not let one down.” From E.M. Forster, “What I Belie…

New paper up on the arXiv! With Nicolas Libedinsky, David Plaza, José Simental, Geordie Williamson, and (unofficially) Adam Zsolt Wagner. A bunch of algebraic combinatorists! And this is a combinat…

I made a game. It’s like Sudoku but dyadic. It’s called Dyadiku. Try it! I’m very interested to see whether people find it playable and fun — in particular, does it admit a …

Six popular math authors, including me, did a round-table interview for the Notices of the American Mathematical Society about talking about math to the non-academic public, or, as the Notices call…

Visit the post for more.

“The American people have just one fixed idea and, since that dominant thought is money, it follows that their spirit has a certain uniform and unpleasant dryness… prodigality is an unf…

This piece of marketing doggerel from McDonald’s, concerning their Xmas-special Grinch meal, is the most foully defiling attempt to imitate Dr. Seuss’s verse I’ve ever encountered…

Yet another example of the kind of problem that falls under the sphere packing / cap set / Turan umbrella I blogged about last week. Let G be SL_2(Z) and H be upper triangular matrices. Then G/H is…

I have been reading about the tendency of poll respondents to overestimate the size of small population subgroups (e.g. if you ask Americans what proportion of Americans are Jews, they’ll say…

I saw a guy today wearing a hoodie that said “Not Vegan.” I’m not vegan either, not even close, but come on. This is like wearing a “Yankees Suck” shirt. I hate the Ya…

Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers, and hey, everyone else too — gratitude is global. In the US, this is the start of the season where people customarily think about their charitab…

OK, they are not really the same thing. But I got you reading, right? Here’s the sense in which they’re all the same thing. Let G be a group and H < G a subgroup. Let m > 1 be an …

I did manage to get home last night from Providence, despite widespread cancellations and delays caused by the government shutdown de-staffing air traffic control. United was speedy, flexible, and …

I thought the book had some interesting virtues but was also quite badly overwritten, and very confusing in its treatment of the mathematics. Here’s my review. For length reasons I wasn’…

Learn more from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

The 2025 MacArthur Fellows have been announced, and I’m very pleased that two of the 22 awardees are my UW-Madision colleagues: congratulations to Ángel F. Adames Corraliza from atmospheric a…

Claudia Prieto is a Venezuelan singer-songwriter about whom I know next to nothing except that she recorded this gorgeous song, “Tus Ojos,” in 2018. By the way, I found out about this s…

It’s Taylor Swift album day! We listened to it last night at 11pm central when it went live. Snap reaction from AB, for whom 1989 is apex Swift and the last two albums have been too moody and…