Switching TeXLive distributions for arXiv
Doing bibliography with BiBLaTeX (and having one huge .bib file - mine is public, by the way)
works great for me.
One downside is that arXiv uses a specific TeXLive
distribution (2016 as of today), and the distribution on my machine is more up to date.
Also, arXiv wants .bbl files uploaded instead of huge .bib files
(.bbl contains only the references actually included in a given paper, and not all over 900 references which are in my .bib file).
The problem is that .bbl files produced by different versions of BiBLaTeX are incompatible (!).
So, to upload a paper to arXiv, I need to install a version of TeXLive identical to the arXiv’s one.
External Tikz pictures
I produce almost all pictures in my math writing in TikZ. This is a nice library (and I’ve learned it over the years), which allows for-loops, effects, etc. The downside for me always was that compiling inline TikZ pictures takes a lot of time. For some months now, while writing a particularly figure-heavy paper, I wondered how I can optimize this.
Following this stackoverflow discussion, I have now adopted a great way of optimizing TikZ pictures by placing them into separate standalone tex files.
Integrable Probability Boston 2018
First FRG workshop, October 2017, Columbia University
Coarsening model on Zd with biased zero-energy flips and an exponential large deviation bound for ASEP
We study the coarsening model (zero-temperature Ising Glauber dynamics) on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ (for $d \geq 2$) with an asymmetric tie-breaking rule. This is a Markov process on the state space ${-1,+1}^{\mathbb{Z}^d}$ of “spin configurations” in which each vertex updates its spin to agree with a majority of its neighbors at the arrival times of a Poisson process. If a vertex has equally many $+1$ and $-1$ neighbors, then it updates its spin value to $+1$ with probability $q \in [0,1]$ and to $-1$ with probability $1-q$. The initial state of this Markov chain is distributed according to a product measure with probability $p$ for a spin to be $+1$.
2018 travel
January
1-12 • Moscow, Russia
13-27 • Creswick (Victoria, Australia) • “Non-equilibrium systems and special functions” program at MATRIX Institute
28-31 • Moscow, Russia • SkolTech Center for Advances Studies
PCMI Summer session 2017 "Random matrices"
A three-week program which brought together numerous leading experts in random matrices and related fields. For me personally this program has started a very exciting collaboration on probabilistic understanding of combinatorial summation identities.
Latexindent
I came across a very nice
source file beautifier called latexindent which is a part
of the standard
distribution.
The script should be run on the source and it would do the stuff I usually like in source files, such as wrapping, indentation of lists and environments, and so on.
The issue with
source files is that everyone using
formats them differently, since the
processing is very forgiving.
In particular, there is lots of whitespace which can be inserted to make
source files more human readable.
The latexindent tool would allow me to automatically standardize
the source code and not think about the various ways one can format the
source.
(Previously in some projects,
in particular in joint ones,
I have spent some time reformatting the source files
to my liking; and while latexindent might not format everything
how I would like, it is extremely configurable, and I can live with it
because of the time it would save me.)