Understanding the calculus

A number of significant changes have have occurred recently that give us a golden opportunity to review the teaching of calculus. The most obvious is the arrival of the microcomputer in the mathematics classroom, allowing graphic demonstrations and individual investigations into the mathematical ideas. But equally potent are new insights into mathematics and mathematics education that suggest new ways of approaching the subject. In this article I shall consider some of the difficulties encountered studying the calculus and outline a viable alternative approach suitable for specialist and non-specialist mathematics students alike

Why High and Low Performers Leave and What They Find Elsewhere: Job Performance Effects on Employment Transitions

Little is known about how high and low performers differ in terms of why they leave their jobs, and no work examines whether pre-quit job performance matters for post-quit new-job outcomes. Working with a sample of approximately 2,500 former employees of an organization in the leisure and hospitality industry, we find that the reported importance of a variety of quit reasons differs both across and within performance levels. Additionally, we use an ease-of-movement perspective to predict how pre-quit performance relates to post-quit employment, new-job pay, and new-job advancement opportunity. Job type, tenure, and race interacted with performance in predicting new-job outcomes, suggesting explanations grounded in motivation, signaling, and discrimination in the external job market

Consistent discretization and canonical classical and quantum Regge calculus

We apply the ``consistent discretization'' technique to the Regge action for (Euclidean and Lorentzian) general relativity in arbitrary number of dimensions. The result is a well defined canonical theory that is free of constraints and where the dynamics is implemented as a canonical transformation. This provides a framework for the discussion of topology change in canonical quantum gravity. In the Lorentzian case, the framework appears to be naturally free of the ``spikes'' that plague traditional formulations. It also provides a well defined recipe for determining the measure of the path integral.Comment: 8 pages, Dedicated to Rafael Sorkin on his 60th birthday, to appear in Proceedings of the Puri Conference, special issue of IJMP

Cosmological Inflation and the Quantum Measurement Problem

According to cosmological inflation, the inhomogeneities in our universe are of quantum mechanical origin. This scenario is phenomenologically very appealing as it solves the puzzles of the standard hot big bang model and naturally explains why the spectrum of cosmological perturbations is almost scale invariant. It is also an ideal playground to discuss deep questions among which is the quantum measurement problem in a cosmological context. Although the large squeezing of the quantum state of the perturbations and the phenomenon of decoherence explain many aspects of the quantum to classical transition, it remains to understand how a specific outcome can be produced in the early universe, in the absence of any observer. The Continuous Spontaneous Localization (CSL) approach to quantum mechanics attempts to solve the quantum measurement question in a general context. In this framework, the wavefunction collapse is caused by adding new non linear and stochastic terms to the Schroedinger equation. In this paper, we apply this theory to inflation, which amounts to solving the CSL parametric oscillator case. We choose the wavefunction collapse to occur on an eigenstate of the Mukhanov-Sasaki variable and discuss the corresponding modified Schroedinger equation. Then, we compute the power spectrum of the perturbations and show that it acquires a universal shape with two branches, one which remains scale invariant and one with nS=4, a spectral index in obvious contradiction with the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy observations. The requirement that the non-scale invariant part be outside the observational window puts stringent constraints on the parameter controlling the deviations from ordinary quantum mechanics... (Abridged).Comment: References added, minor corrections, conclusions unchange

Categorifying Hecke algebras at prime roots of unity, part I

We equip the type $A$ diagrammatic Hecke category with a special derivation, so that after specialization to characteristic $p$ it becomes a $p$-dg category. We prove that the defining relations of the Hecke algebra are satisfied in the $p$-dg Grothendieck group. We conjecture that the $p$-dg Grothendieck group is isomorphic to the Iwahori-Hecke algebra, equipping it with a basis which may differ from both the Kazhdan-Lusztig basis and the $p$-canonical basis. More precise conjectures will be found in the sequel. Here are some other results contained in this paper. We provide an incomplete proof of the classification of all degree $+2$ derivations on the diagrammatic Hecke category, and a complete proof of the classification of those derivations for which the defining relations of the Hecke algebra are satisfied in the $p$-dg Grothendieck group. In particular, our special derivation is unique up to duality and equivalence. We prove that no such derivation exists in simply-laced types outside of finite and affine type $A$. We also examine a particular Bott-Samelson bimodule in type $A_7$, which is indecomposable in characteristic $2$ but decomposable in all other characteristics. We prove that this Bott-Samelson bimodule admits no nontrivial fantastic filtrations in any characteristic, which is the analogue in the $p$-dg setting of being indecomposable.Comment: 44 pages, many figures, color viewing essential. V2 contains corrections from referee reports. To appear in Transactions of the AM

Advanced Methods in Black-Hole Perturbation Theory

Black-hole perturbation theory is a useful tool to investigate issues in astrophysics, high-energy physics, and fundamental problems in gravity. It is often complementary to fully-fledged nonlinear evolutions and instrumental to interpret some results of numerical simulations. Several modern applications require advanced tools to investigate the linear dynamics of generic small perturbations around stationary black holes. Here, we present an overview of these applications and introduce extensions of the standard semianalytical methods to construct and solve the linearized field equations in curved spacetime. Current state-of-the-art techniques are pedagogically explained and exciting open problems are presented.Comment: Lecture notes from the NRHEP spring school held at IST-Lisbon, March 2013. Extra material and notebooks available online at http://blackholes.ist.utl.pt/nrhep2/. To be published by IJMPA (V. Cardoso, L. Gualtieri, C. Herdeiro and U. Sperhake, Eds., 2013); v2: references updated, published versio