The "What Is...?" column

Date: Feb 18, 2012

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
  68. What is…the parity phenomenon? — John Friedlander and Henryk Iwaniec, August 2009
  69. What is…the complex dual to the real sphere? — Simon Gindikin, September 2009
  70. What is…Stanley depth? — M. R. Pournaki, S. A. Seyed Fakhari, M. Tousi, and S. Yassemi, October 2009
  71. What is…a Legendrian knot? — Joshua M. Sabloff, November 2009
  72. What is…a Rota-Baxter algebra? — Li Guo, December 2009
  73. What is…an Oka manifold? — Finnur Larusson, January 2010
  74. What is…a halting probability? — Cristian S. Calude and G. J. Chaitin, February 2010
  75. What is…a Gaussian entire function? — Fedor Nazarov and Mikhail Sodin, March 2010
  76. What is…a Wilf-Zeilberger pair? — Akalu Tefera, April 2010
  77. What is…a perverse sheaf? — Mark Andrea de Cataldo and Luca Migliorini, May 2010
  78. What is…a kinetic solution for degenerate parabolic-hyperbolic equations? — Gui-Qiang G. Chen and Benoît Perthame, June/July 2010
  79. What is…a paraproduct? — Árpád Bényi, Diego Maldonado, and Virginia Naibo, August 2010
  80. What is…a sandpile? — Lionel Levine, James Propp, September 2010
  81. What is…a linear algebraic group? — Skip Garibaldi, October 2010
  82. What is… cost? — Damien Gaboriau, November 2010
  83. What is…a mock modular form? — Amanda Folsom, December 2010
  84. What is… persistent homology? — Shmuel Weinberger, January 2011
  85. What is…a free cumulant? — Jonathan Novak, Piotr Sniady, February 2011
  86. What is… equivariant cohomology? — Loring W. Tu, March 2011
  87. What is…a G2-manifold? — Spiro Karigiannis, April 2011
  88. What is…a infra-nilmanifold endomorphism?? — Karel Dekimpe, May 2011
  89. What is…a resplendent structure? — Roman Kossak, June/July 2011
  90. What is…a derived stack? — Gabriele Vezzosi, August 2011
  91. What is… Thompson’s group? — J. W. Cannon, W. J. Floyd, September 2011
  92. What is…a stationary measure? — Alex Furman, October 2011
  93. What is…a natural proof? — Timothy Y. Chow, December 2011
  94. What is…a Fenchel conjugate? — Heinz H. Bauschke, Yves Lucet, January 2012
  95. What is…a pseudoconvex domain? — R. Michael Range, February 2012
  96. What is…an affine sphere? — Daniel J. F. Fox, March 2012
in

Comments

Submitted by Rongmin (not verified) on Mon, 2009-07-20 01:48

Thanks heaps, Armin. This is very useful.

Submitted by Philip (not verified) on Fri, 2009-09-25 15:16

Hi,
this is really useful. Thanks!

Submitted by Konrad Voelkel (not verified) on Thu, 2010-06-17 13:06

Thanks, that is really useful. I love the "What is ..." column!

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