16 Oct 2024
I wrote a story back in July that I realised, upon reading it back, was entirely non-fictional
(modulo the exact words used in dialogue). A lot of the things I write are semi-autobiographical
anyway, so I was intending to pass it off as just another (fictional) short story. Then a couple of
weeks later I saw The Malahat Review’s
submission call for the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize, and I thought I might as well enter,
as it isn’t every day that I write a piece of CNF.
12 Sep 2024
I’m excited to announce that my short story “The Vigil,” which appeared in
Ricepaper Magazine
last year, has been selected for inclusion in the anthology
Best Canadian Stories 2025, which showcases the best Canadian short fiction published
in 2023. If you’re interested, the book should be out in stores in a few weeks, but in the meantime
you can preorder it from the
publisher’s website.
(But you should also consider buying it from your local independent bookshop!)
06 Apr 2023
In early July of 2021, I was on a holiday with my parents in Canmore. This was the first stop in a
long journey during which I planned to split off from my parents in Revelstoke, meet my university friends in
Kelowna, and then drive across Canada back to Montréal, so I had brought a decent stack of books with me.
In that stack was a short story collection by Margaret Atwood
called Dancing Girls. The stories themselves were pretty
good (honestly I don’t remember the details of most of them), but it was the first page that intrigued
me. It looks like this (TeX reproduction because I don’t have access to a good digital camera right now):
15 Jul 2022
Jonah Saks and I have uploaded our paper “Alternating-sum statistics
for certain sets of integers” to the arXiv. We show that if ${\cal F}$ is
a set family in our class, then a certain alternating-sum statistic is constant. This constant equals $-1$
in the case where ${\cal F}$ is the set of all finite primitive sets. Towards the end of the paper,
we generalise the notion of primitive sets to $s$-multiple sets and show that if $s\ge 2$, then the
alternating-sum statistic we study is not constant, but as $n$ increases it equals $(-1)^s {n-2\choose s-1}$.
24 Sep 2021
I’m taking a class on quadratic forms, orthogonal groups, and modular forms this semester, and
the class is formatted such that students present extended solutions to exercises in pairs on a rotating
basis. Well, this week it is my turn to present a description of four dimensional real quadratic spaces
over ${\bf R}$, along with my comrade Jad Hamdan.
Neither
Jad nor I had had any exposure to Lie groups before this week, so we worked out the following with
a great deal of guidance from the instructor of the course, Prof. Henri Darmon.
I’m writing this blog post to organise and collect my thoughts before the actual presentation. I’ll go
ahead and assume a level of mathematical background equal to my own before the class started, namely,
an undergraduate understanding of group theory, linear algebra, and topology
but no experience with differential geometry or topological groups.
