[Baypiggies] Greeting from Sunny

Ulf Wostner wostner at cyberprof.com
Wed Jan 9 06:58:40 CET 2008


Greetings Sunny,

Good to hear from you!  Happy New Year to you too! 

I though about you when some excitement was stirred about the E-8 (Lie) group 
possibly providing a theory-of-everything competing with string theory.  
Would be nice it it's true, but I don't see any leading scientists lining up 
behing that idea.

Interesting with those awards.  The Whitney Extension problem is beautiful, 
particularly now when we know it's true.

Terence Tao remains one of my heroes, for sure.  He gave a talk at MSRI some 
years back, as did Edward Whitten.  Slides are at their site.

I'm busy doing work in Python, and getting to ready to teach.  

In the fall I hope to be doing Math 70 Liberal Arts online, probably using the 
Moodle (open-soure, of course) Course Management Software.

The CS Dept just asked me to sub for a few weeks doing their CS 170 Artificial 
Intelligence course.  I'll start out with logic and later introduce Lisp, and 
by then the regular prof will hopefully be back on his feet again.

What are you doing these days?   I remember you making a video in the class 
room before Math 115.  Are you in Hollywood now?

Later,

UW







On Tue Jan 8 2008 21:29:44 SN wrote:
> Hi, Professor Wostner,
>
>   First of all, happy new year to you!
>
>   I was student (Sunny) in your 07 Spring semester 115 Discrete Math . I am
> writing just to have a chick chat with you about the fresh AMS news--2008
> Prizes. I noticed something interesting that most of 2008's big research
> prizes winners have direct or indirect connections with Princeton.
> According to hearsay, Princeton and IAS have crucial influences on many of
> the big prizes decisions. One of the titans in mathematics, Charles
> Fefferman, was awarded the Bocher with Andrew Bressan of Penn State and
> Carlos Kenig of Chicago. I heard that Fefferman's sensational work on the
> Whitney's Extention Problem was extremely technical. He was already famous
> without the Bocher, being one of the youngest Fields Medalists and the
> youngest full professor American higher education ever made (much younger
> than Terry Tao compared with the relative prize granted ages). The
> Whitney's problem had stood unsolved for a long time, not even Whitney, the
> reputable analyst, himself was able to get it settled. Another star (young
> blood) is Manjul Bhargava--Andew Wiles' student. More details on AMS's
> website http://www.ams.org/ams/prizebooklet-2008.pdf
>   I am not sure if you would find this news exciting. I know you are always
> busy with teaching and school administrative (programming?) work so you may
> not have time to browse the current news.
>
>   Hope you have a wonderful new year. Talk to you later when I run into
> you.
>
>   Sincerely,
>   Sunny




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