Benjamin’s Homepage

• Email address is bp at this domain.
• Probe my identity and find my GPG key on Keybase. (Let me know if you want an invite.)
• Track the HTTPS support of popular websites with HTTPSWatch.
• I wrote a plea for saner integer overflow behavior.
• The way the tech industry conducts technical interviews is bad.
• I hight “Benjamin”.

Assorted Quotes

“Inquiring minds must know!”—Mikhail Kapranov

“An alternative approach is to use [Grothendieck] universes, but this requires assuming additional set-theoretic axioms. The reader is invited to ignore such questions.”—J.S. Milne

“The geometry of Banach spaces lies in darkness and has attracted the attention of many talented research mathematicians.”—John Bligh Conway

“The problem is most easily grasped when stated in the language of cricket.”—Hardy and Littlewood

“The mathematics that comes from the ‘baroque’ inbreeding of the work of people with bad taste is often ugly and doomed to quick oblivion. The instinctive good taste of the geniuses who led the way is needed to guide the rest of us, and when we don't let it, we get generalization for the sake of generalization. We get what I have heard Zygmund call centipede mathematics (remove 99 legs and see what it can do); we get the elaborate elaborations of Baire category theory in fuzzy topological semigroup.”—Paul Richard Halmos

“The theory of Hilbert spaces absolutely trivial. I really mean that.”—[Name omitted to protect the innocent.]

Math Word Blacklist

I’m collecting technical math terms that are overloaded with meanings. Kindly do not assign any more definitions to these words. Email me to suggest more.
• admissible
• canonical
• exceptional
• generic
• normal
• ordinary
• regular
• simple

BSD

$$\lim_{s\to 1}\frac{L_E(s)}{(s - 1)^r} = \frac{2^r\Omega\#Ш(E/\mathbb{Q})R(E/\mathbb{Q})\prod_pc_p}{\#E_{\mathrm{tors}}(\mathbb{Q})^2}\style{font-size: 250%; color: red;}{?}$$