Category Archives: Op-eds

“How come I haven’t been reimbursed yet?”, I wrote to the organiser. More than three months have already passed since that glorious conference in Nice. Long enough to feel the pinch on the purse, but not enough to forget this luscious … Continue reading →

No, this blogpost has nothing to do with social stratification and class struggle nor does it address gender or racial inequalities. It is about Mathematics. The occasion? I have finally finished a book, which has been 3 years in the … Continue reading →

When did my chain-smoking leftist Italian friend move to Saudi Arabia? I wondered. I had just received his recent preprint, in which he cites King Saud University  (KSU) as his affiliation.  The answer to my query was even more colorful than … Continue reading →

It is only 4:00 am (Pacific time) on this chilly Sunday morning, yet I am surrounded by many of British Columbia’s academic elite. Actually, we are flying back home from Ottawa, all eager to get back early enough to catch … Continue reading →

Using “Google scholar” has always been a most frustrating experience. My publications/citations got always mixed with those of a cardiologist cousin of mine in Paris, and those of a childhood friend who founded a publishing house in London. But who … Continue reading →

The early days of Gary Goodyear as Minister of State for Science and Technology were on the rocky side. A well publicized stormy meeting with a CAUT delegation, and a reported attempt to intervene in a peer-review process may have been lapses in … Continue reading →

Last Friday, I gave a talk at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley, California. That the talk was at 11:00 am on 11/11/11 was a pure coincidence. That it started 11 minutes late was not. But “numerology” is … Continue reading →

No, I am not talking about the ordinary tale of the love, passion and mathematics triangle. Nor am I talking about the film, “The Rites of Love and Math” where, having realized that they are seeing each other for the last … Continue reading →

“What were you doing in Montréal?” I asked. “I gave a plenary lecture at the Congress of the Mathematical Association of Quebec on ‘L’erreur en Mathématiques’ … and I cited you a lot :)”. My friend was only half-joking! What he was talking … Continue reading →

… at least not by faculty, and assuming that the main trigger for the “Occupy.X” movement is the following –quite eloquent– table. Indeed, I learned recently that Canadian university presidents are not always the highest paid within their institutions, and … Continue reading →

If you are not yet aware, Steve Jobs has died. Under his tight grip, the Apple brand and its derivatives became an integral part of modern culture. Inevitably, his appearances and statements were often diverted and distorted. His death is no … Continue reading →

One month after more than 100 academics, including six Nobel laureates, wrote to the British prime minister to complain about cuts to chemistry by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), today’s Guardian reports that the mathematicians of the … Continue reading →

A few hours after our last post was up, NSERC produced a reply to the letter of the chair of the Math/NSERC Liaison committee regarding term limits. All what I can say for now,  is that if the staffer had … Continue reading →

Not long after the most controversial Discovery grant competition ever –at least for the Evaluation Group for Mathematics and Statistics (EG 1508)– NSERC announced that 3 out of the 4 members of that EG Executive –who were at the center … Continue reading →

An old friend of mine (and a superb analyst/probabilist/mathematical biologist & geneticist) e-mailed me last January. “I am sitting here in the meeting of the nominating committee at the American Mathematical Society (AMS). The committee hopes that you will consider … Continue reading →