July 2018 – SPP 2026

Contractible 3-manifolds and positive scalar curvature

It is known that \(\mathbb{R}^3\) admits a complete metric of uniformly positive scalar curvature. In fact, for any closed manifold \(X\) and any \(k \ge 3\) the manifold \(X \times \mathbb{R}^k\) admits a complete metric of uniformly positive scalar curvature by a result of Rosenberg and Stolz (link). Now there exist contractible, open 3-manifolds which are not … Continue reading

Prizes, prizes, prizes

Several prizes have been awarded in the past few weeks to mathematicians. Kyoto Prize The Kyoto Prize 2018 in the category Basic Sciences was awarded to Masaki Kashiwara from the RIMS at Kyoto University. (announcement) The Kyoto Prize is awarded annually to “those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural, and spiritual betterment of mankind” … Continue reading

Peter Scholze a new director at MPI Bonn

Peter Scholze is a new director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. You can read a bit more about this news here: link.

Equivariant band matrices and Fourier series

Recall that in the first post of this series we claimed that there exists an infinite matrix \(T\) which is in the closure (in operator norm) of the band matrices with uniformly bounded entries, but for which we have \(\|T^{(R)}\| \to \infty\). Here \[T^{(R)}_{m,n} := \begin{cases} T_{m,n} & \text{ if } |m-n| \le R\\ 0 & … Continue reading

Two new presidents

Professor Volker Mehrmann from the TU Berlin was elected as the new president of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). His four-year term will start January 1st, 2019. More information can be found in the press release: link. Professor Daya Reddy was elected first president of the International Science Council (ISC). The ISC is newly founded … Continue reading