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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3185 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 18, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Today’s Wiki-walk:

After reading today’s XKCD (which is a real hoot, let me tell you), I scrolled down past where I usually scroll and found Randall’s links to other webcomics. I used to read Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics daily, so I clicked through to it, to procrastinate retiring to my slumber.

After today’s Dinosaur Comics (the plural is part of the title, similar to Psalms), I clicked the arrow for yesterday’s comic. It, too, was witty. Then I clicked the text for a random comic, and got one where the dinos discuss mathematicians always doing their best work before they’re 40. Both the Fields medal and the Abel prize were mentioned. This discussion was of interest to me, as I’m both over 40 and planning a paper for a discovery I’ve made in number theory.

Having never heard of the Abel medal, I Googled it. It’s a medal specifically designed to correct the oversight of the Nobels not including a prize for math. What caught my eye was the 2008 awardees, John G. Thompson and Jacques Tits.

John Thompson, the solver of the nilpotency of Frobenius kernels, and Jack Tits, the classifier of all irreducible buildings of spherical type. Also, the Tits alternative, the Tits building, the Tits cone (“of major importance is the fact that X is convex”), the Tits group, the Tits index, the Tits metric, and Tits systems.

I go to bed with a smile tonight thinking of Thompson and Tits.

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