Just attended a week-long meeting at Oberwolfach on arithmetic geometry.
- “So did you do this computation like Gauss, or did you use a computer?” – Gabber to Katz
- “Let the indices work it out themselves!” – Janssen
- “Shouwu, either you’re going to answer my question, or I’m going to hand you over to Ofer!” – Kisin
- Katz (telling a story at the beginning of his talk): “… So anyway, after Spencer returned to Princeton, this is how he described the math department at Stanford [where he had just been a professor for a couple years]: ‘At Stanford, they’re still studying the topology of the unit disk!’ ”
Conrad (from the audience): “Those days are over.”
- “We use what I wrote.” – Janssen reassuring Gabber
- “So Peter, why did you turn down the breakthrough prize? [pause] I’m only asking because I’m drunk!”
- Anon.: “So Ofer, do you come here much?”
Gabber: [looks down at table, silently moves his finger across it in stepwise motion for 30 seconds] “Seventeen times.”
- Two common referees for technical papers on Shimura varieties: Frobenius and Verschiebung.
- Me (after writing down the “new” definition of a diamond): “Is that OK, Peter?”
Scholze (from the back row): “Looks good!”
- Zhang: “So Mochizuki is like the Buddha. He writes his ideas. He is satisfied. If you want to understand them, you visit him, you ask him questions, he gives you a little idea, you go away and study. You have to be a monk. Have a monk’s approach.”
Anon.: “Unfortunately, there aren’t very many good monks.”
- A “symplectic lifting whatever shit”. Apparently they’re defined in Kai-Wen Lan’s thesis?
- Gabber was NOT happy when he heard about Mochizuki’s Gaussian integral analogy.
- While eating the horrible bread casserole thing, which Kedlaya, Lieblich and I had mangled pretty badly while serving ourselves:
Lieblich:”What is this supposed to BE?”
Kedlaya: “Some kind of croque madame?”
Nizioł: “Yes, a croque madame. But I think you guys croqued it.”
totallydisconnected 