THE THINGS WE SET TO MUSIC

Why we worry about the things we shouldn't...and ignore the things we should.

It would be a lot easier to enjoy your life if there weren't so many things trying to kill you every day. The problems start even before you're fully awake. There's the fall out of bed that kills 600 Americans each year. There's the early-morning heart attack, which is 40% more common than those that strike later in the day. There's the fatal plunge down the stairs, the bite of sausage that get...

Things we know we know.

What is the point of university? In the modern state, we are faced with a plethora of competing and sometimes contradictory answers to this question. To some extent, the answer depends on who is paying, which differs considerably between countries. At one extreme, the Nordic countries continue to fund higher education almost entirely from general taxation. At the other, private institutions in ...

Should we sweat the small (micro) things?

Thirty years ago, a physician whose patient had diabetes and was urine protein dipstick–positive could only say, “You will most likely progress to end-stage renal disease in 10 years and need dialysis or a kidney transplant, and there is not much we can do about it.” Following the landmark microalbuminuria study of Mogensen and Christensen in 1984 (1 ), clinicians could say to patients with dia...

Things we don't talk about.

Simple Things We Don’t Know

This is a quite faithful rendering of a Colloquio De Giorgi I had the honor to give at Scuola Normale Superiore on March 21, 2012. The idea was to explain some open problems in arithmetic algebraic geometry which are simple to state but which remain shrouded in mystery. 1. An interactive game: dimension zero Suppose I give you an integer N ≥ 2, and tell you that I am thinking of a monic integer...