07 June 2009

In which we find out who uses RSS

This blog, as you probably have gathered, has been unused for some time. It will probably return to being unused soon. But for those of you who have it in your RSS feed, so that you are automatically alerted to new posts, I wanted to give a brief update.

I am happily in graduate school at UC Berkeley, studying quantum field theory. My quals are in less than a week, so I am reading and reviewing. This term I discovered that my favorite way to study is to write copious amounts. If you like to read, I invite you to check out the following:

  1. Lie Groups and Lie Algebras (pdf). These are edited lecture notes from a one-semester class last fall. They should be fairly complete and accurate, but please let me know about any errors: typos are easy to fix, and mathematical errors should be corrected for morality sake.
  2. Poisson Lie linear algebra in the graphical language (pdf). This article outlines all the definitions from the theory of Lie bialgebras, but does it using only Penrose's ``birdtrack'' notation, championed by among others Cvitanovic.
  3. Some notes on Quantum Groups (pdf). These are not particularly edited, and are rather ideosyncratic, and include the graphical language article as a chapter.


I hope to say a few words here about some of this material. In particular, I'm thinking of writing about the following: the Weyl character formula; symplectic leaves of Poisson manifolds; what is quantization. Whether I actually write such entries is still up in the air, of course. Currently, I primarily post content directly to my website, but that doesn't have an RSS feature. If there are still people who watch this space, leave a comment, and I'll get into the habit of writing a blog entry any time I post something new to my website.