En junio de 2023 al volver de un viaje a Viena y Amsterdam empecé con síntomas de un resfrío fuerte. Pero la fiebre no bajaba y después de unos días llamamos al servicio médico. Terminé yendo en ambulancia al pronto soccorso del Ospedale di Cattinara en Trieste. Tenía una fea pulmonía. Mientras estuve en el hospital escribí las notas que siguen. Me llama mucho la atención las jerarquías dentro del hospital marcadas por uniformes de varios colores.

Iperborea is an italian publishing house founded by Emilia Lodigiani in 1987 which aims to bring to Italian readers the literature of northern Europe. Their books have a distinctive format and texture of their covers making them instantly recognizable while browsing in a bookstore. Not all of their titles are easy to find in English in Italy so they are a good way for me to connect to Scandinavian culture while also practicing my Italian.

Towards the end of my Ph.D. years at The Ohio State University together with a bunch of graduate students we thought of publishing our own magazine. We struggled to come up with a good name for it so after a lot of back and forth we settled on “The Empy Set”. The OSU graduate advisor found this too nihilistic and wanted us to pick a different name. We nevertheless wrote what inevitably ended up being the only issue of “The Empty Set” and circulated it among the department.

An old paper (Über hypergeometrische Funktionen, deren letztes Element speziell ist) by W. Heymann (from a talk by Wadim Zudilin) discusses the value of an ${}_2F_1$ at special $t$’s. He does $t=-1/3,1/4,1/5$ and related values and mentions Gauss for $t=1,-1,1/2$ and Kummer for $t=-1/8,1/9,8/9$. For example we have this identity $$ F_h = F \left( -\frac{h}{2}, -\frac{h}{2} + \frac{1}{2}, h + \frac{3}{2}, -\frac{1}{3} \right) = \frac{2}{3} \cdot \left( \frac{8}{9} \right)^h \cdot \frac{\Gamma \left( \frac{1}{3} \right) \cdot \Gamma \left( h + \frac{3}{2} \right)}{\sqrt{\pi} \cdot \Gamma \left( h + \frac{4}{3} \right)} $$ If we take $h=1/2$ we get an HGM defined over $\mathbb Q$, we get the gamma vector $[-4,1,1,2]$ and corresponding Weierstrass model $$ y^2+xy=x^3+\frac t{64}x.

This book, published in 2007, is a discussion of various mathematical experiments in Number Theory using the computer. The main computational tool used is the sophisticated package PARI-GP. Maybe the best way to describe the book in more detail is to just quote its preface. Preface -------- There is a long and distinguished tradition in mathematics, perhaps even more pronounced in number theory, whereas a chance discovery of a pattern or identity between numbers arising from unrelated calculations leads to the development of whole new fields (this is precisely how Gauss phrases it in a diary entry).

This project got started at a fabulous workshop held in Benasque, Spain (in the mountains, a few hours drive from Barcelona) in 2009. I wrote this post in my blog after returning from another workshop there on p-adic analysis in 2007. In my own notes I added: The place is truly amazing. Mountains falling over you as you walk down the street. The plan of the 2009 workshop was to explore ways to compute exotic L-functions, not arising from elliptic curves or usual modular forms.

I am not sure where I got this from. I do remember my aunt, the writer Alicia Plante, back in Buenos Aires, mentioning a recipe of baked fish with blue cheese that I prepared a few times. In the US I adapted it using big mushrooms instead of fish. But maybe I got the idea somewhere. 1 Get some big round mushrooms, for example, shitake mushrooms. I read that one should never wash the mushrooms with water as they get ruined somehow but gently remove any impurities with a soft brush.

After a fair number of iterations this is the result of my cooking pasta with greens. At home we just call it Pasta Verde. This version is with Swiss chard but a real nice combination is dandelion leaves (tarassaco in Italian) and Swiss chard (bieta). You can see how the various steps follow those for cooking a risotto. 1 Start preparing about an hour in advance a thick broth to use to cook the pasta.

Many years ago after an invited seminar talk at ISTA in Vienna we went with my host Tamas Hausel and some of his group for dinner to a Croatian restaurant. I had fish I think and a side dish of potatoes and chard, which I really loved. I have been trying to reproduce it from memory ever since. I found out later (while on vacation in Lussinpicolo) that it is actually a standard traditional dish in Croacia known as blitva (which simply means chard).