Metals Get an Awkward Cousin

Cousin Marriage

It is a great honour to be invited to contribute a lecture to this long-established series* founded to commemorate a very eminent physician of the Bristol Medical School an a member of a family distinguished for services to medicine and to the City over man/ years. I have also seen with particular pleasure that the first Long Fox lecture ^ given by John Beddoe, a pioneer of British anthropology...

Gravity’s Scalar Cousin

The “dilaton”, the Goldstone boson of spontaneously broken conformal field theories (in flat spacetime), is argued to provide a surprisingly provocative scalar analog of gravity. Many precise parallels and contrasts are drawn. In particular, the Equivalence Principle, the Cosmological Constant Problem, and the tension between them is shown to be closely replicated. Also, there is a striking tra...

Graphene and Cousin Systems

Mobilization Forum: Awkward Movements

Several years ago, Gay Seidman complained in an article in Mobilization that scholars of the South African antiapartheid movement had so ignored the role of armed struggle as to leave the impression that the movement and its most famous leader, Nelson Mandela, were nonviolent in the Gandhian mold. In fact, Mandela was the first military commander of the African National Congress. He owed his po...

Duality for Cousin Complexes

We relate the variance theory for Cousin complexes − developed by Lipman, Nayak and the author to Grothendieck duality for Cousin complexes. Specifically for a Cousin complex F on (Y, ∆)—with ∆ a codimension function on a formal scheme Y (noetherian, universally catenary)—and a pseudo-finite type map f : (X, ∆) → (Y, ∆) of such pairs of schemes with codimension functions, we show there is a der...