{"id":2059,"date":"2009-06-21T15:43:58","date_gmt":"2009-06-21T20:43:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ubuntu.my\/wp30\/archives\/2009\/06\/21\/xkcd_meets_real.html"},"modified":"2010-05-20T21:10:13","modified_gmt":"2010-05-21T02:10:13","slug":"xkcd_meets_real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/archives\/2009\/06\/21\/xkcd_meets_real.html","title":{"rendered":"xkcd meets reality"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this week, <a href=\"http:\/\/xkcd.com\/599\/\">xkcd posted a fantastic comic<\/a> about the apocalypse happening and the dead rising to walk the earth. In the comic, mathematicians scribbled frantically and raced to Paul Erdos&#8217; grave to get him to sign a document that is presumably co-authorship on a paper. (For the uninitiated, read about the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Erdos_number\">Erdos number<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>Anyhow, I forwarded this to <a href=\"http:\/\/research.microsoft.com\/en-us\/um\/people\/cohn\/\">Henry Cohn<\/a> &#8211; a mathematician friend of mine &#8211; who sent me the most hysterical email that I just had to share:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>By the way, there&#8217;s no need to wait until the end times to write papers with dead mathematicians.  One example of this is the paper &#8220;Higher algebraic K-theory of schemes and of derived categories&#8221; by R. W. Thomason and Thomas Trobaugh, which Thomason wrote with his deceased friend Trobaugh after Trobaugh appeared to him in a dream:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The first author must state that his coauthor and close friend, Tom Trobaugh, quite intelligent, singularly original, and inordinately generous, killed himself consequent to endogenous depression.  Ninety-four days later, in my dream, Tom&#8217;s simulacrum remarked, &#8216;The direct limit characterization of perfect complexes shows that they extend, just as one extends a coherent sheaf.&#8217;  Awaking with a start, I knew this idea had to be wrong, since some perfect complexes have a non-vanishing K_0 obstruction to extension.  I had worked on this problem for 3 years, and saw this approach to be hopeless. But Tom&#8217;s simulacrum had been so insistent, I knew he wouldn&#8217;t let me sleep undisturbed until I had worked out the argument and could point to the gap.  This work quickly led to the key results of this paper.  To Tom, I could have explained why he must be listed as a coauthor.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this week, xkcd posted a fantastic comic about the apocalypse happening and the dead rising to walk the earth. In the comic, mathematicians scribbled frantically and raced to Paul Erdos&#8217; grave to get him to sign a document that is presumably co-authorship on a paper. (For the uninitiated, read about the Erdos number.) Anyhow, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[776,781,786],"class_list":["post-2059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digitalness","tag-geek","tag-humor","tag-mathematics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2059"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2446,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2059\/revisions\/2446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}