arminstraub.com

I very much enjoy reading the "What Is…?" column in the Notices of the AMS. Unfortunately, there seemed to be no index to this column. I have therefore created this one in the hope that it'll be helpful to others as well.

1. What is…an amoeba? — Oleg Viro, September 2002
2. What is…the monster? — Richard Borcherds, October 2002
3. What is…a building? — Kenneth S. Brown, November 2002
4. What is…an alteration? — Frans Oort, December 2002
5. What is…a shtuka? — David Goss, January 2003
6. What is…a gerbe? — Nigel Hitchin, February 2003
7. What is…a train track? — Lee Mosher, March 2003
8. What is…a stack? — Dan Edidin, April 2003
9. What is…a worm? — Harold Boas, May 2003
10. What is…a bubble tree? — Thomas Parker, June/July 2003
11. What is…a dessin d’enfant? — Leonardo Zapponi, August 2003
12. What is…a curvelet? — Emmanuel Candès, December 2003
13. What is…a quasi-morphism? — D. Kotschick, February 2004
14. What is…a billiard? — Yakov Sinai, April 2004
15. What is…a free lunch? — Fredy Delbaen and Walter Schachermayer, May 2004
16. What is…an operad? — James Stasheff, June/July 2004
17. What is…an expander? — Peter Sarnak, August 2004
18. What is…a grope? — Peter Teichner, September 2004
19. What is…a topos? — Luc Illusie, October 2004
20. What is…a motive? — Barry Mazur, November 2004
21. What is…a flip? — Alessio Corti, December 2004
22. What is…an open book? — Emmanuel Giroux, January 2005
23. What is…a brane? — Gregory Moore, February 2005
24. What is…a dimer? — Richard Kenyon and Andrei Okounkov, March 2005
25. What is…a horseshoe? — Mike Shub, May 2005
26. What is…property tau? — Alex Lubotzky, June/July 2005
27. What is…a compacton? — Philip Rosenau, August 2005
28. What is…a Lefschetz pencil? — Robert Gompf, September 2005
29. What is…a pseudoholomorphic curve? — Simon Donaldson, October 2005
30. What is…a Gröbner basis? — Bernd Sturmfels, November 2005
31. What is…a random matrix? — Persi Diaconis, December 2005
32. What is…a quantum group? — Shahn Majid, January 2006
33. What is…a graph minor? — Bojan Mohar, March 2006
34. What is…a syzygy? — Roger Wiegand, April 2006
35. What is…percolation? — Harry Kesten, May 2006
36. What is…a coarse space? — John Roe, June/July 2006
37. What is…a strange attractor? — David Ruelle, August 2006
38. What is…a quasicrystal? — Marjorie Senechal, September 2006
39. What is…a bad end? — Charles Epstein, October 2006
40. What is…Turing reducibility? — Martin Davis, November 2006
41. What is…a quasiconformal mapping? — Juha Heinonen, December 2006
42. What is…a projective structure? — William Goldman, January 2007
43. What is…a Young tableau? — Alexander Yong, February 2007
44. What is…a minimal model? — János Kollár, March 2007
45. What is…a tropical curve? — Grigory Mikhalkin, April 2007
46. What is…an infinite swindle? — Valentin Poénaru, May 2007
47. What is…a Galois representation? — Mark Kisin, June/July 2007
48. What is…a Higgs bundle? — Steve Bradlow, Oscar García-Prada, and Peter Gothen, September 2007
49. What is…a Woodin cardinal? — John Steel, October 2007
50. What is…Boy’s surface? — Robion Kirby, November 2007
51. What is…a cluster algebra? — Andrei Zelevinsky, December 2007
52. What is…quantum chaos? — Ze’ev Rudnick, January 2008
53. What is…JPEG? — David Austin, February 2008
54. What is…a systole? — Marcel Berger, March 2008
55. What is…property A? — Piotr Nowak and Guoliang Yu, April 2008
56. What is…a toric variety? — Ezra Miller, May 2008
57. What is…forcing? — Thomas Jech, June/July 2008
58. What is…outer space? — Karen Vogtmann, August 2008
59. What is…an ∞-category? — Jacob Lurie, September 2008
60. What is…stable commutator length? — Danny Calegari, October 2008
61. What is…a cross ratio? — François Labourie, November 2008
62. What is…a period domain? — James Carlson and Phillip Griffiths, December 2008
63. What is…the Schwarzian derivative? — Valentin Ovsienko and Sergei Tabachnikov, January 2009
64. What is…a skein module? — W. B. Raymond Lickorish, February 2009
65. What is…Lehmer’s number? — Eriko Hironaka, March 2009
66. What is…measure rigidity? — Manfred Einsiedler, May 2009
67. What is…an elliptic genus? — Serge Ochanine, June/July 2009