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Ben Spitz

@diracdeltafunk

Sheaf Herder. I believe in you πŸ”₯ benspitz.com

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10.10.2023
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Latest posts by Ben Spitz @diracdeltafunk

If X is a separable Banach space, then the unit ball of X* is metrizable in the weak* topology! This fact plays a significant role in the theory of Banach spaces, iirc.

09.02.2026 20:01 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

As a concept, it comes up pretty often in basic functional analysis. Urysohn's theorem in particular is probably not so important, but it is very cool imo.

09.02.2026 19:57 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

The fact that there are so many probability paradoxes should make it clear that probability was a mistake. Things either happen or they don't, and we'll just have to wait to find out which. Be ye not tempted by sorcery.

15.01.2026 18:41 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I've arrived in DC for JMM!

DM me if you're around, I'd love to grab coffee etc :)

03.01.2026 19:10 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Yes I love multisets

01.01.2026 19:50 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Haha I should've looked at your full name

01.01.2026 19:29 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I think where you should start depends a lot on how much background you have with commutative algebra (and comfortability with rings / modules in general) -- how do you feel about these things

01.01.2026 19:25 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Happy new year, all :)

01.01.2026 19:23 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Hardy came to visit Ramanujan in the hospital on New Year's Day.

"On my way here, I noticed that the current year is 2026. A very uninteresting number."

"On the contrary! 2026 is the 40th smallest positive integer which is expressable as the sum of 7 cubes in at least 9 ways."

01.01.2026 19:23 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Literally true, check out my papers 😎

bsky.app/profile/moti...

14.12.2025 20:16 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
The Formal Context of Saturated Transfer Systems on Finite Abelian Groups We describe the reduced formal context of the lattice of saturated transfer systems on a finite abelian group. As an application, we compute that there are 13,784,538,270,571 saturated transfer system...

I worked with UVA undergraduate Seth Bernstein on this fun homotopical combinatorics project: arxiv.org/abs/2511.02982

He'll be presenting a poster on it at this year's JMM! meetings.ams.org/math/jmm2026...

12.12.2025 21:50 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

So, Ξ³' is also a unit-speed parametrization of the unit circle! In particular, we have Ξ³'(t) = Ξ³(t+Ο€/2), i.e.

cos'(t) = cos(t+Ο€/2) = -sin(t)

sin'(t) = sin(t+Ο€/2) = cos(t)

10.12.2025 14:30 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Now consider the parametrization Ξ³ of the unit circle defined by

Ξ³(t) = (cos(t), sin(t)).

This parametrization has constant speed 1 (by definition, if you'd like!)

That means Ξ³'(t) is a unit vector for all t, and we know it is orthogonal to Ξ³(t) for all t by the GEOMETRY FACT.

10.12.2025 14:30 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
A yellow circle with center O, and tangent line T to the circle. The line segment (radius) from O to the point of intersection between T and the circle is shown. The radius is orthogonal to T.

A yellow circle with center O, and tangent line T to the circle. The line segment (radius) from O to the point of intersection between T and the circle is shown. The radius is orthogonal to T.

Same as the e^{ix} thing but said differently:

We start with a πŸ’₯GEOMETRY FACTπŸ’₯

A tangent line to a circle at a point p is orthogonal to the radius of the circle at p.

10.12.2025 14:30 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Idk but looks kinda weird. I found this PDF, which seems to be from the same "Wallot": www.leonschools.net/cms/lib/FL01...

09.12.2025 17:25 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

On the Ο‰th day of Christmas my true love gave to me

Ο‰ numbers natural

...

And a partridge in a pear treeeeee

04.12.2025 23:58 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
GitHub - Macaulay2/M2 at development The primary source code repository for Macaulay2, a system for computing in commutative algebra, algebraic geometry and related fields. - GitHub - Macaulay2/M2 at development

The package will be included in the next Macaulay2 release (scheduled for November I think). Or you can grab it from the development branch to install it now!

github.com/Macaulay2/M2...

I think this will genuinely save equivariant homotopy theorists a lot of time and hair-wringing, I'm so stoked.

17.09.2025 03:44 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Very very happy with this project we ran at the M2 workshop this summer in Madison -- it is now possible to do compute Ext, Tor, etc. of C_p-Mackey functors by computer!

The image below shows how you can use the package to compute a free resolution of a C_p-Mackey functor.

17.09.2025 03:44 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

"What can we do about this? Simply choose to live in the worst of both worlds."

13.09.2025 16:42 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I'm interested (for weird reasons) in the asymptotics of this expression as n,m β†’ ∞

And more generally in the distribution of the number of such pairs (A,B), but that seems much harder than just studying the mean.

10.09.2025 00:19 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

What is the expected number of pairs (A,B) with AβŠ†{1,...,n} and BβŠ†{1,...,m} such that

(i) X_{i,j} = 1 for all (i,j) ∈ AΓ—B

(ii) A and B are maximal with respect to (i), i.e. if A'βŠ‡A and B'βŠ‡B are such that (A',B') satisfies condition (i) then A=A' and B=B'

?

The answer is given by this expression.

10.09.2025 00:18 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Spoilers for what might possibly become a paper, but ...

Make an nΓ—m matrix X where each entry X_{i,j}~Bernoulli(p) is chosen independently at random,

i.e. X_{i,j} = 1 with probability p and X_{i,j} = 0 with probability 1-p.

...

10.09.2025 00:18 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

More honestly, I'd like to get some asymptotic control over this quantity as n,m -> infty

09.09.2025 22:57 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Nah, but it seems simple enough that I wouldn't be surprised if someone had thought about this sum before; maybe it's the expected value of some distribution people care about

09.09.2025 22:56 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

oh!? if you could drop a link to something I would really appreciate it, I have no idea what those are :^)

09.09.2025 22:54 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

and/or something like "this is the expected value of a Blorp(n,m,p)-distributed random variable" would be very helpful!

09.09.2025 22:49 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
\sum_{i=0}^n \sum_{j=0}^m \binom{n}{i} \binom{m}{j} p^{i j} (1-p^i)^{m-j} (1-p^j)^{n-i}

\sum_{i=0}^n \sum_{j=0}^m \binom{n}{i} \binom{m}{j} p^{i j} (1-p^i)^{m-j} (1-p^j)^{n-i}

... can this be simplified at all? n and m are fixed positive integers, p is a fixed real number between 0 and 1.

09.09.2025 22:45 πŸ‘ 6 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 6 πŸ“Œ 0

When I first learned about this I was baffled -- how can there possibly be only a set's worth of isomorphism classes of compact metric spaces???

But there is, and it's awesome

04.09.2025 21:18 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Gromov–Hausdorff convergence - Wikipedia

gl!

I love the metric space of isomorphism classes of compact metric spaces en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gromov%...

04.09.2025 20:36 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

More generally, we can ask: for which positive real numbers K can the inequality

|(f(z)-f(w))/(z-w)| ≀ K |f'(z)|

be satisfied?

K < 1 is impossible (consider f(z) = z^n - nz for arbitrary large integers n)

K β‰₯ 4 is possible (proved by Smale)

This is all we know!

25.08.2025 15:15 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0