Kirsten Wickelgren, Department of Mathematics,
Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, Duke University

ArXiv (29): Massey products <y,x,x,…,x,x,y> in Galois cohomology via rational points, 2016
Homepage(s): Publications (CV), Wikipedia

First email:  Apr 21, 2023, 4:33 PM

Dear Prof. Dr. Kirsten Wickelgren:

Your CV includes the 2012 work on Grothendieck’s Anabelian Conjectures (The Harvard College Mathematics Review). Impressive. Your Wikipedia page is also most impressive. Of course, Duke is a great place to be!  And, you are to be a speaker in Paris at the GAP 2023 — Homotopy Algebras and Higher Structures. Congratulations on creating great foundations. 

Even though I am just a visitor to your work from among the great unwashed, given your history, I hope that I can ask a few basic questions:

1. Have you ever seen the five- tetrahedral gap (famously missed by Aristotle and documented by Lagarias and Zong, AMS-2015 Conant Award) over and under a five-octahedral gap? It’s a pretty object, but I don’t think there is anybody else who has written about it. Do you think it could be important?

2. Do you know if there are any scholars who have written about the nature of these gaps? How do such gaps manifest within space and time? These questions are part of my trek as an occasional high school geometry  teacher and my walk with the students inside a tetrahedral-octahedral complex. It is a sweet story. In just 45 base-2 steps we were within the fermions. With another 67 steps we were within the Planck scale. Going out larger, in 90 steps we were at the current time and estimated size of the universe. It is a challenging outline! Of course, your comments about it all would be highly valued. Thank you.

Most sincerely,

Bruce

####