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the matrix reloaded

Published May 1, 2012 by lieven

The dinosaurs among you may remember that before this blog we had the ‘na&g-forum’ to accompany our master-class in noncommutative algebra & geometry.

That forum ran on an early flat-panel iMac G4 which was, for lack of a better name, baptized ‘the matrix’.

The original matrix did survive the unification of the three Antwerp universities and a move to a different campus but then died around bloomsday 2007 and was replaced by an intel iMac.

This second matrix did host a number of blogs and projects started (and usually ended rather quickly) such as ‘MoonshineMath’, a muMath-site called noncommutative.org, the ‘F-un Mathematics’ blog dedicated to the field with one element and, of course, this blog.

About a month ago matrix-II was replaced by a state-of-the-art iMac running 10.7. The transition went smooth apart from the fact that 10.7 doesn’t like ‘localhost’ but prefers ‘127.0.0.1’ in setting up wordpress blogs.

Besides neverendingbooks, matrix-III runs angs@t – angs+ which is the blog of the antwerp noncommutative geometry seminar. It will be revamped over the summer and will probably be the website for our renewed master-class, starting next year.

The ‘F-un Mathematics’ blog was dropped in the transition but still survives at Ghent University where it is managed by Koen Thas.

As far as NeverendingBooks is concerned i hope to make a fresh start with blogging and will try to get more structure in this site by changing to a responsive wordpress theme (‘These responsive, fluid, or adaptive WordPress themes, automatically adjust according to the screen size, resolution and device on which they are being viewed’).

As a result this page will look weird from time to time over the next week or so. My apologies.

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3 related new math-sites

Published September 14, 2011 by lieven

F_un Mathematics

Hardly a ‘new’ blog, but one that is getting a new life! On its old homepage you’ll find a diagonal banner stating ‘This site has moved’ and clicking on it will guide you to its new location : cage.ugent.be/~kthas/Fun.

From now on, this site will be hosted at the University of Ghent and maintained by Koen Thas. So, please update your bookmarks and point your RSS-aggregator to the new feed.

Everyone interested in contributing to this blog dedicated to the mathematics of the field with one element should contact Koen by email.

angst

Though I may occasionally (cross)post at F_un mathematics, my own blog-life will center round a new blog to accompany the master-course ‘seminar noncommutative geometry’ I’m running at Antwerp University this semester. Its URL is noncommutative.org and it is called :

Here, angs is short for Antwerp Noncommutative Geometry Seminar and the additions @t resp. + are there to indicate we will experiment a bit trying to find useful interactions between the IRL seminar, its blog and social media such as twitter and Google+.

The seminar (and blog) are scheduled to start in earnest september 30th, but I may post some prep-notes already. This semester the seminar will try to decode Smirnov’s old idea to prove the ABC-conjecture in number theory via geometry over the field with one element and connect it with new ideas such as Borger’s $\mathbb{F}_1$-geometry using $\lambda$-rings and noncommutative ideas proposed by Connes, Consani and Marcolli.

Again, anyone willing to contribute actively is invited to send me an email or to comment on ‘angst’, tweet about it using the hashtag #angs (all such tweets will appear on the frontpage) or share its posts on Google+.

Noncommutative Arithmetic Geometry Media Library

Via the noncommutative geometry blog a new initiative maintained by Alain Connes and Katia Consani was announced : the Noncommutative Arithmetic Geometry Media Library.

This site is dedicated to maintain articles, videos, and news about meetings and activities related to noncommutative arithmetic geometry. The website is still `under construction’ and the plan is to gradually add more videos (also from past conferences and meetings), as well as papers and slides.

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wp-latex’ sweet revenge : wp+MathJax-> ePub

Published September 5, 2011 by lieven

In the early days of math-blogging, one was happy to get LaTeXRender working. Some years later, the majority of math-blogs were using the, more user-friendly, wp-latex plugin to turn LaTeX-code into png-images. Today, everyone uses MathJax which works with modern CSS and web fonts instead of equation images, so equations scale with surrounding text at all zoom levels.

However, MathJax has one downside : it doesn’t parse in ePub-readers. Peter Krautzberger wrote a post Epub and mathematics in which he suggested two methods to turn MathJax into ePub, but after dozens of experiments I still fail to reproduce these.

No doubt, someone will soon come up with a working alternative, but for the impatient here’s a quick but dirty method to turn your MathJax powered wordpress post into ePub :

the tools

  • download and install the ePub export plugin. It automatically creates an ePub file when a post or page is published or updated. The ePubs are stored in the uploads directory (to be found in the wp-contents directory).
  • download and install the wp-latex plugin. MathJax uses the normal \$ tex-delimeters whereas wp-latex requires \$latex, so this plugin doesn’t interfere with the default use of MathJax.
  • download the wp2latex python script. It converts a standard LaTeX file into a format that is ready to be copied into WordPress.

the routine

  • Edit the post you want to convert to ePub. Copy the contents of the post box to a file say post1.tex and save this in the same directory containing the latex2wp.py script.
  • In Terminal go to that directory and type the command ‘python latex2wp.py post1.tex’. It will produce a new file post1 in the same directory.
  • Copy the contents of post1 into the post box of your WordPress-post and press the update button. This time the TeX-commands in your post will be rendered using wp-latex and the ePub export-plugin will have created an ePub-version of it.
  • Locate this newly created ePub file in the relevant wp-contents/uploads/ folder (file has a number.epub name) and, if wanted, change its name into something easier to recognize and copy it somewhere outside the uploads directory. This will be your desired ePub-version of the post.
  • Replace the contents of the post box of your WordPress-post with the contents of the post1.tex file and hit the ‘Update’ button, to restore your original post (powered by MathJax).
  • Email your ePub-file to your iPad and open it with iBooks. Not quite as nice as MathJax-parsed TeX but a lot better than reading unparsed TeX-commands.
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