General news—February 2008

Not entirely surprisingly, my hibernation is going to go on for longer than I had hoped. The reason for this is quite simple: there is a major push to get the Princeton Companion to Mathematics finished within the next couple of months or so, and if I spend time blogging then it won’t happen. There has also been a delay with the Tricks Wiki, but that may be less severe because I am not the main bottleneck for that (though there are a few things I need to do before it can be up and running). This term I am giving a first course on probability. I had planned a few blog entries on that too, and I hope I’ll have time for some in due course.

General news — December 2007

As I predicted in an earlier post, my rate of posting has (temporarily) gone right down. This is partly for the reasons I said—I am very busy with a final push to finish the Princeton Companion to Mathematics, and busy in general—but also for another reason. I was going to keep personal matters rigorously excluded from this blog but since my secret is out (see the comments on Examples First II on November 17th) I may as well also mention that I have a five-week-old son, Octave, who doesn’t leave much time for blogging given that my other commitments won’t go away. So this isn’t a proper post but just a way of saying that my blog hasn’t died: it’s just hibernating. Meanwhile, I can at least briefly mention that a “Tricki”—that is, a Wiki-style website devoted to theorem-proving techniques—will almost certainly exist in the near future. Remarkably, my earlier post on this idea led to an offer of technical help that will be enough to turn it from a fantasy into a reality. And that’s saying something, since my own technical ability in this area is basically zero. I’ve seen a prototype and it looks great. Probably we’ll get a small site up and running and I’ll then ask for comments about how it could be improved before we throw it open. (We still haven’t decided what policy to adopt about who can edit what, but we are actively thinking about it.) And that’s it from me until 2008.

About this blog

As I mentioned in my first post, I am very busy at the moment, so my rate of posting will soon go right down, probably until about February. However, I wanted to have at least one post that had mathematical content (as opposed to remarks about the presentation of mathematics) since I hope that in the end that will be the main focus of the blog. So the post about cubics is supposed to be more representative of what this blog is about. Thanks to all who have contributed so far. Although I had read about the power of blogs it nevertheless came as a surprise to see from the stats how many more visits a blog gets than a homepage, and also to discover how easy it is to get useful advice. I’ve even had a serious offer of technical help with setting up new wiki-style websites, so there’s a good chance that some of those ideas will actually be realized.