# All Questions

25,326 questions
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### Converse to Euclid's fifth postulate

There is a fascinating open problem in Riemannian Geometry which I would like to advertise here because I do not think that it is as well-known as it deserves to be. Euclid's famous fifth postulate, ...
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### Why do combinatorial abstractions of geometric objects behave so well?

This question is inspired by a talk of June Huh from the recent "Current Developments in Mathematics" conference: http://www.math.harvard.edu/cdm/. Here are two examples of the kind of combinatorial ...
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### Enriched Categories: Ideals/Submodules and algebraic geometry

While working through Atiyah/MacDonald for my final exams I realized the following: The category(poset) of ideals $I(A)$ of a commutative ring A is a closed symmetric monoidal category if endowed ...
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### Does every triangle-free graph with maximum degree at most 6 have a 5-colouring?

A very specific case of Reed's Conjecture Reed's $\omega$,$\Delta$, $\chi$ conjecture proposes that every graph has $\chi \leq \lceil \tfrac 12(\Delta+1+\omega)\rceil$. Here $\chi$ is the chromatic ...
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### What is the current understanding regarding complex structures on the 6-sphere?

In October 2016, Atiyah famously posted a preprint to the arXiv, "The Non-Existent Complex 6-Sphere" containing a very brief proof $S^6$ admits no complex structure, which I immediately read and ...
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### Extending a line-arrangement so that the bounded components of its complement are triangles

Given a finite collection of lines $L_1,\dots,L_m$ in ${\bf{R}}^2$, let $R_1,\dots,R_n$ be the connected components of ${\bf{R}}^2 \setminus (L_1 \cup \dots \cup L_m)$, and say that {$L_1,\dots,L_m$} ...
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### What does the theta divisor of a number field know about its arithmetic?

This question is about a remark made by van der Geer and Schoof in their beautiful article "Effectivity of Arakelov divisors and the theta divisor of a number field" (from '98) (link). Let me first ...
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### Uniformization over finite fields?

The following is a question I've been asking people on and off for a few years, mostly out of idle curiosity, though I think it's pretty interesting. Since I've made more or less no progress, I ...
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### What is the “real” meaning of the $\hat A$ class (or the Todd class)?

In the Atiyah-Singer index theorem as well as in the Grothendieck-Riemann-Roch theorem, one encounters either the $\hat A$-class or the Todd class, depending on the context. I want to focus on the ...
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### Example of a compact set that isn't the spectrum of an operator

This question is somewhat ill-posed (due to the word easy) and is triggered by idle curiosity: Is there an easy example of a (separable, infinite-dimensional) Banach space $X$ and a nonempty ...
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### A three-line proof of global class field theory?

There is an idea (I think originally due to Tate) that class field theory is fundamentally a consequence of Pontrjagin duality and Hilbert Theorem 90. I'm curious whether this can phrased using modern ...
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### Microlocal geometry - A theorem of Verdier

(1) In "Geometrie Microlocale", Verdier states the following theorem. Theorem: Let $E$ be a vector space and $F$ a constructible complex on $E$. Then for $\ell$ a linear form on $E$, we have a ...
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### Subalgebras of von Neumann algebras

In the late 70s, Cuntz and Behncke had a paper H. Behncke and J. Cuntz, Local Completeness of Operator Algebras, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Jan., 1977), pp. 95-...
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### Homology of $\mathrm{PGL}_2(F)$

Update: As mentioned below, the answer to the original question is a strong No. However, the case of $\pi_4$ remains, and actually I think that this one would follow from Suslin's conjecture on ...