So narrowly educated

In a tribute to the mathematician Israel Moiseevich Gelfand (Notices of the AMS, vol. 60, no. 2, p. 162), Dusa McDuff recalls meeting Gelfand in Moscow.

Then [Gelfand] gave me his recent paper on Gelfand-Fuchs cohomology to read. It was titled “The cohomology of the Lie algebra of vector fields on a manifold”, but I had been so narrowly educated that I didn’t know what cohomology was, what a Lie algebra was, what a vector field was, or what a manifold was.

I know one definition of a vector field, but it’s probably not the same as the one in the paper mentioned. Right now I also don’t know the definitions of the other three terms.

Dream Tomica: Godzilla

This Dream Tomica Godzilla is really nice. Its release coincides with Godzilla’s 60th anniversary. (See also this website from the Wall Street Journal.)

Pope John Paul II

I’m selling a Pope John Paul II comic book (Tagalog version) published by Gospel Komiks. Gospel Komiks usually published comic books in English and in Tagalog versions, so there is most likely an English version of this issue.

The Brave and The Bold

This Batman: The Brave and the Bold Batmobile is really nice. It has a large Batman head hood ornament, just like the Batmobile of the 1940’s.

(While writing this blog post, I found a very colorful version of this car, apparently sold at the 7th Hot Wheels Convention in Mexico last 2014.)

Winter Bash 2014

Stack Exchange Winter Bash 2014 ends tomorrow. I got more hats this time than last year. I like the fact that you can rotate, translate, and resize the hats.

The Universe in a Handkerchief

I recently bought a copy of Martin Gardner’s The Universe in a Handkerchief (New York: Copernicus, 1996). (In a future blog post, I’ll describe in more detail how I bought it.) The book’s subtitle is “Lewis Carroll’s Mathematical Recreations, Games, Puzzles, and Word Plays.” I present here some items in the book that I found very interesting.