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.

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