## Graph: number of primes containing a given digit

You can ask lots of questions about primes. After posting 50 facts about primes, I couldn't resist making another graph. In this one, the x-axis is $n$ and the y-axis is the number of primes up to $n$ that contain a given decimal digit (written in decimal, of course). I've plotted all of these on […]

## 50 Awesome facts about prime numbers

A prime is a natural number greater than one whose only factors are one and itself. I find primes pretty cool, so I made a list of 50 facts about primes: The first twenty primes are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, […]

## Exotic dimensions used in ring theory

Do you ever get the feeling that mathematics uses the word dimension a lot? Well, that's for good reason. The concept of dimension is fundamental in mathematics. What is dimension? You can think of dimension as a numerical invariant characterizing the number of parameters required to do a certain thing. For example, for vector spaces, […]

## Beamer vs reveal.js for math presentations

I've used Beamer to prepare all my slide-based math presentations, and so does virtually everyone else. It works pretty well with minimal effort. It even has sensible defaults to dissuade users from creating walls of text, although I've definitely seen my share of walls of text. Recently there has been a craze of JavaScript-powered presentation […]

## Free notes on rigidity of groups acting on manifolds

A final version of a 160-page text written by Aaron Brown and others appeared on the arXiv today. The abstract: This text is an expanded series of lecture notes based on a 5-hour course given at the workshop entitled "Workshop for young researchers: Groups acting on manifolds" held in Teresópolis, Brazil in June 2016. The […]

## Weak dimension one rings are axiomatizable

Let $R$ be a ring. In the previous post on pure exact sequences, we called an exact sequence $0\to A\to B\to C\to 0$ of left $R$-modules pure if its image under any functor $X\otimes -$ is an exact sequence of abelian groups for any right $R$-module $X$. Here is yet another characterization of purity: Theorem. […]

## Pure exact sequences

Over the next few posts, I'll talk more about axiomatizability of algebraic structures in first-order logic. Before I do that, we need to know about purity of exact sequences. So let's fix a ring $R$. An exact sequence $$0\to A\to B\to C\to 0$$ in the category of left $R$ modules is called pure if for […]

## Axiomatizability of classes of structures

Let's talk about axiomatizability in first-order logic, with examples in ring theory. Let's call a class $\Ccl$ of rings axiomatizable if there exists a set $T$ of first order sentences such that $C\in\Ccl$ if and only if $C$ is a model of $T$ (that is, satisfies every sentence in $T$.) What are some examples? The […]

## Fun with principal ideal domains

A commutative ring $R$ is called a principal ideal domain (PID) if every ideal of $R$ can be generated by a single element. If $R$ is a principal ideal domain, is every subring of $R$ a principal ideal domain? No, definitely not. That is because you can take any integral domain that is not a […]

## A quick intro to Galois descent for schemes

This is a very quick introduction to Galois descent for schemes defined over fields. It is a very special case of faithfully flat descent and other topos-descent theorems, which I won't go into at all. Typically, if you look up descent in an algebraic geometry text you will quickly run into all sorts of diagrams […]