The n-Category Café

A little more than ten years ago, a Canadian member of parliament gave a speech denouncing wasteful government spending, singling out in particular a grant entitled “Lie theory and its combinatorics”.

I’m drafting a paper at the moment provisionally entitled:

Fusion in Nuclear Spaces

Actually, I’m not. However, the real reason why I do my best to avoid algebraic geometry is because if I combine some aspects of my work with those of said subject I could get into serious trouble with papers such as

Blow-ups in Nuclear Spaces

Okay, so the above is “papers I could write if I wanted to get in trouble”. The following is a true story.

Back in the days of my PhD, I owned an old car (older than me) which was always in for repairs. One morning, I was waiting for it to be fixed whilst catching up on a little light reading (something on Feynman integrals and Wiener measures if I remember aright). So imagine my confusion when, from the other side of the garage, the mechanic yelled out:

You’ve got a crack in your manifold, mate!

I have tracked down a quote attributed to Kasner and Newman (whoever they might be) commenting on the different meanings of the word “function”, though my source does not give a date. A more amusing quote is the following from none other than Maxwell himself (commenting on another’s speech):

Mr Spencer in the course of his remarks regretted that so many members of the Section were in the habit of employing the word Force in a sense too limited and definite to be of any use in a complete theory of evolution. He had himself always been careful to preserve that largeness of meaning which was too often lost sight of in elementary works. This was best done by using the word sometimes in one sense and sometimes in another and in this way he trusted that he had made the word occupy a sufficiently large field of thought.

Colin Adams tells the story in his Knot Book that he’s sitting doing some work in his office, when an undergraduate walks in and, attempting to make conversation, the student asks him what his favourite part of maths is. “Knot theory,” he says. “Yeah, me neither,” replies the student.

Ken Ribet (a well-known number theorist) greatly relishes telling people that he studies “arithmetic.”

Serge Lang’s “A Course in Arithmetic” is similarly confusing to people.

I have an old friend from college who’s an anthropologist. She also studies “representation theory.”

A physicist colleague of mine was carrying a book on “Group Theory”. Someone (I believe from the personnel department) saw him with the book and asked him, a little surprised: “Oh, so you are also interested in the welfare of employees?”

Once the 15 year old son of a friend came over and saw sitting on the coffee table a copy of Serre’s ‘Complex semi-simple Lie algebras’. He remarked ‘Complex… yet semi-simple…?’

My copy of Sternberg has a bookshop price label attached that reads “Group Therapy and Physics”.

The secretaries of Caltech’s Math Department found this hilarious, although I heard it so long ago that I don’t recall the source.

It seems that a distinguished visiting scholar phones the Math Department to give them the title of the talk he’s scheduled to deliver. The secretary types up a notice of what she thinks she heard. It is copied, and put on bulletin boards all over campus.

When the distinguished visiting scholar arrives, he is astonished to see the auditorium overflowing with audience members.

His talk was supposed to be on “Convex Sets.” The posted announcements read: “Convicts and Sex.”

First a 1939 quote from Herman Weyl:

‘The name “complex group” formerly advocated by me…has become more and more embarrassing through collision with the word “complex” in the connotation of complex number. I therefore propose to replace it by the corresponding Greek adjective “symplectic.”’

And then I have to mention the “maths debate” we once had at school (I’m not making it up!), much to the delight of us teenagers.

Similarily to Greg’s: The University of Victoria library has a book in their algebra section that some confused librarian has labelled “Combinatorial Group Therapy.” Sometimes I feel like I could use some of that.

There’s a book by Serge Lang called “Complex Multiplication” (which turns out to be a topic in elliptic curve theory). I knew about complex numbers from high school algebra, but couldn’t see how someone could write a whole book about how to multiply them…

I remember a story I’ve read somewhere about a government official overseeing construction of battleships, more than a hundred years ago. He complained that engineers decided to make ships’ engines with turret drilling machines. It was hard to persuade him that the term “turret drilling machines” doesn’t mean “drilling machines for making turrets”.