Trust me, I'm a doctor!

Nov 02 2017, 19:31

Finally!

Six months after I had turned in my dissertation, I have finally received the approval on the damn thing.

Some thoughts about teaching introductory courses in set theory

Sep 22 2017, 00:39

Dianna Crown, the physics woman on YouTube, has posted a video where she is interviewed by her editor about why and how she found herself majoring in physics in MIT.

Here is the video:

Dangerous knowledge in the Information Age

Aug 11 2017, 13:09

Back in the days of yore, if one wanted to know mathematics, one would have to go to the university and take a course; or hire a tutor; or go to the library and open a book and learn on their own.

And that was fine. All three options are roughly equivalent, in the sense that they present you the material in a very structured way (or they at least intend to). You don't reach the definition of \(\aleph_0\) because you defined what is equipotency and cardinality. You don't reach the definition of a derivative before you have some semblance of notion of continuity. Knowledge was built in a very structural way. Sometimes you use crutches (e.g. some naive understanding of the natural numbers before you formally introduce them later on as finite ordinals), but for the most part there is a method to the madness.

The transitive multiverse

Jul 22 2017, 22:18

There are many discussions on the multiverse of set theory generated by a model. The generic multiverse is given by taking all the generic extensions and grounds of some countable transitive model.

Hamkins' multiverse is essentially taking a very ill-founded model and closing it to forcing extensions, thus obtaining a multiverse which is more of a philosophical justification, for example every model is a countable model in another one, and every model is ill-founded by the view of another model. The problem with this multiverse is that if we remove the requirement for genericity, then everything else can be satisfied by the same model. Namely, \(\{(M,E)\}\) would be an entire multiverse. That's quite silly. Moreover, we sort of give up on a concrete notion of natural numbers that way, and this seems a bit... off putting.

Strong coloring

Jul 07 2017, 12:02

I am sitting in the 6th European Set Theory Conference in Budapest, and watching all these wonderful talks, and many of them use colors for emphasis of some things. But yesterday one of the talks was using "too many colors", enough to make me make a comment at the end of the talk after all the questions were answered. Since I received some positive feedback from other people here, I decided to write about it on my blog, if only to raise some awareness of the topic.

There is a nontrivial percentage of the population which have some sort of color vision deficiency. Myself included. Statistically, I believe, if you have 20 male participants, then one of them is likely to have some sort of color vision issues. Add this to the fairly imperfect color fidelity of most projectors, and you get something that can be problematic.

Moment of Zen

May 16 2017, 14:26

When one is ascending a difficult path uphill, it is a good idea to keep your eyes on the path as you move forward. However, it is not a bad idea to stop sometimes, look back, and appreciate the beauty of the ground you have already covered.

What a long strange trip it's been...

Apr 25 2017, 09:28

As some of you may have noticed, I don't use this blog to write about my papers in the "traditional way" math bloggers summarize and explain their recent work. I think my papers are prosaic enough to do that on their own. I do use this blog as an outlet when I have to complain about the arduous toil of being a mathematician (which has an immensely bright light side, of course, so in the big picture I'm quite happy with it).

This morning I woke up to see that my paper about the Bristol model was announced on arXiv. But unbeknownst to the common arXiv follower, this also marks the end of my thesis. The Hebrew University is kind enough to allow you to just stitch a bunch of your papers (along with an added introduction) and call it a thesis. And by "stitch" I mean literally. If they were published, you're even allowed to use the published .pdf (on the condition that no copyright infringement occurs).

Stationary preserving permutations are the identity on a club

Mar 20 2017, 23:50

This is not something particularly interesting, I think. But it's a nice exercise in Fodor's lemma.

Theorem. Suppose that \(\kappa\) is regular and uncountable, and \(\pi\colon\kappa\to\kappa\) is a bijection mapping stationary sets to stationary sets. Then there is a club \(C\subseteq\kappa\) such that \(\pi\restriction C=\operatorname{id}\).

Got jobs?

Feb 19 2017, 15:42

Good news! I'm about to finish my dissertation. Hopefully, come summer I will be Dr. Asaf Karagila.

So the next order of business is finding a position for next year. So far nothing came up. But I'm open to hearing from the few readers of my blog if they know about something, or have some offers that might be suitable for me.

Farewell, Matti

Feb 06 2017, 19:06

My mentor, teacher, mathematical confidant and generally good friend, Matti Rubin passed away this morning. Many of the readers here know him for his mathematical work, many knew him as a friend as well, or as a teacher.

Matti was a kind teacher, even if sometimes over-pedantic.