Patrick Corn

me 810 Evans Hall
Department of Mathematics, UC Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720
corn@math.berkeley.edu

A little about myself

I'm a graduate student in the mathematics department at the University of California at Berkeley. My friend Rob (not my other friend Rob) says that to spell Berkeley, you should "put in an 'e' whenever you can," but that advice can lead to problems if you take it too literally. I'll be graduating sometime around May 2005; suffice it to say it's been awhile since I passed my qualifying exam. I was playing quite a bit for the ultimate frisbee team here, since I worked up an appetite for college ultimate while playing for the Dukes of Harvard, until I abruptly broke my clavicle in April 1999 during practice. It took a year to heal, but I was finally able to return to the Berkeley ultimate team, and Berkeley finished its 2000-01 season ranked 13th in the country. Since then I've been playing for an East Bay coed team called Grind. We started Regionals in 2001 and 2002 as the 13th seed both times, and made it to 7th in 2001 and 4th in 2002 (just missing Nationals, losing in the game to go). We changed the name to Bender in 2003, and I was out for several months with back issues, but we still managed to finish just out of Nationals in 2003, 4th again (coming in seeded 7th), losing in two straight games-to-go. Though I'm finally out of collegiate eligibility, there's always a chance to relive old glories--if you have the right plugin, you may actually be able to see a little movie clip of me throwing for a score against Yale at Northeast Regionals, May 1998. (How long ago it seems!) Try here.

I'm currently studying cubic surfaces, Brauer-Manin obstructions, and other related ideas from algebraic geometry and number theory. My advisor is Bjorn Poonen. He helped put together a conference in Palo Alto in December 2002 entitled "Rational and integral points on higher-dimensional varieties," at which I gave a short talk. (I guess 2 is a high enough dimension, at least for me.)

I went to Harvard from 1994-1998, and I learned there that I'm predisposed towards warmer climates. I did manage to have a good time there, despite the mountains of work, and to discover why it's ranked #1 in every poll, except perhaps the AP top 25 poll, whose top spot after the 2002-03 season was seized by the Ohio State Buckeyes .

I wrote an undergraduate thesis at Harvard, with the able guidance of Professor Richard Taylor. You may be able to download the PostScript file of it if you go here.

My affections for mathematics and ultimate, both sorely tested but still intact, were first cultivated at the Ross Young Scholars Program at the Ohio State University. I spent 6 summers there in all, and I loved it.

I'm originally from Columbus, Ohio, where I went to high school at The Columbus Academy. That appears to end this chronologically backward tour of my life (a la "The Once and Future King").

Here are some random links to check out.
Math 1a stuff.
Finally, it's over. The last word on Blast Corps is here.
The five most overrated movies I've ever seen.
Music I've been listening to recently. As if you cared. Or check out my new improved list of my 20 favorite albums.
A little humor, in the form of error message haikus.
Some chess problems and annotated games.
The best marriage of good mathematics and the movies is undoubtedly the first scene in the otherwise unremarkable It's My Turn. My professor actually cited this scene as the best place to look for a proof of the snake lemma (as he didn't want to do it himself in class), and I've seen in cited in at least one algebra textbook for the same reason. Click here for a lovely quote from the movie, and here for a more thorough examination of math in the movies.