Vanishing Girls, Mysterious Blacks

The Mysterious Vanishing Frogs of North America

I have a passion for all things slimy, wet, and creepy-crawly. Some of the best times of my life have been spent on my knees, digging in the dirt for earthworms, traipsing back from ponds with buckets of putrid swamp water teeming with tadpoles, or chasing fat little toads in knee-high grass. I love the outdoors and all of the ugly animals that inhabit it. I like to catch them, watch them, and ...

Mysterious Marriage

And Mysterious

" I think you might do something better with the time " , Alice said, " than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answer "-from A Mad Tea-Party Abstract. First year undergraduates usually learn about the classical Rolle's theorem saying that between two consecutive zeros of a smooth function f one can always find at least one zero of f ′. But what happens with the zeros of higher derivativ...

Mysterious origins

A survey of 2 006 U.S. adults last year revealed that 48 % believe the earliest humans lived at the time of the dinosaurs. This survey is often cited as evidence of Americans’ dismal understanding of science. But earlier this year, a television program from the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) told those muddled masses that they could well be right. The program, called The Mysterious Origins...

Vanishing Vanishing Cycles

If A• is a bounded, constructible complex of sheaves on a complex analytic space X, and f : X → C and g : X → C are complex analytic functions, then the iterated vanishing cycles φg[−1](φf [−1]A •) are important for a number of reasons. We give a formula for the stalk cohomology H∗(φg[−1]φf [−1]A •)x in terms of relative polar curves, algebra, and the normal Morse data and micro-support of A•.