#they put up posters around campus advertising the conference that happened to have a picture of him | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

trivalentlinks · 1 year ago

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Let F be a Floer homology theory. For the purposes of this talk, you can assume it's any Floer homology theory you like, and if you don't like any Floer homology theory, then pretend you do like one and assume it's that one

-- a conference speaker

#floer homology #math #maths #mathblr #you really should have at least one Floer homology theory you like!!#i have for a while wanted to do a longpost about floer homology #a very cool concept that shouldn't yield anything but miraculously does #and also about the guy who came up with it (andreas floer)#who was a very interesting guy #he died in 1991 at age 34 which is usually when an academic is only starting to build their influence #and thus didn't have any phd students #and most people in the math community don't seem to have known him personally #(his wikipedia page has a section of quotes about him but they're all about his math #which is pretty much universally agreed to be one of the most striking developments of modern mathematics)#but one time they did a memorial conference a couple years ago in his honour at (uc) berkeley #where they talked about the extremely fruitful field of research he pioneered #they put up posters around campus advertising the conference that happened to have a picture of him #and apparently a bunch of old guys showed up who knew nothing about math #it turned out they were his housemates in the gay commune he used to live in #who were going for a walk around campus and saw a poster with his photo and were like #'wait isn't that our buddy who died twenty-some years ago??'#apparently they knew nothing about math so it was totally incomprehensible to them but they attended the whole conference anyway

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