Home Page of N. Christopher Phillips

(This page will always be under construction, and is updated at irregular intervals. Please bear with me.)

Welcome to my Home Page!

I am a Professor in the Mathematics Department at the University of Oregon. My research specialty is operator algebras. I maintain an operator algebraist email directory, whose updates carry announcements of interest to operator algebraists, and a page of WWW operator algebra resources. I also maintain several web pages with information for people attending conferences at the Mathematics Department at the University of Oregon; details here.

For the 2008--2009 academic year, I am teaching Math 684 through 686 (course outline in pdf or AMSLaTeX), and, in the spring quarter, a very large section of Math 243 (statistics for business and social science students).

In June 2009, I will give a one week course on crossed product C*-algebras, at the International Summer School on Operator Algebras and Applications in Lisbon, Portugal. A draft of a related set of lecture notes is available on the course page.

Lectures at the Shanghai Special Week on Operator Algebras.

I remain involved with the organization of the West Coast Operator Algebra Seminars (WCOAS). Here are the locations of the next several:

• 2009: University of Nevada at Reno. Organizing committee: Bruce Blackadar, Valentin Deaconu, and Alex Kumjian.

Current interest: Five Year Diversity Plan Draft, May 2005, and what is wrong with it.

Links (to be expanded in the future):

• Watch what you say on campus:

  

• Common errors in undergraduate mathematics (especially in calculus courses), and Errors made by calculators and computers.
• Research by academic economists at UCLA shows how Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" socialist policies turned a recession into a Great Depression:
  • UCLA press release.
  • Wall Street Journal article.
  • Scholarly article: New Deal Policies and the Persistence of the Great Depression: A General Equilibrium Analysis, by Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian, Journal of Political Economy, 2004, vol. 112, no. 4, pages 779--816. (Subscription may be required, but the link works from UO computers.)
  • Preprint of the paper (pdf; freely available).
  From the press release: "New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago [1933] thwarted economic recovery for seven long years." One of the biggest villains: "specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933". In short, the Great Depression was a failure of socialism, not of capitalism.
• Underpublicized political evil:
  • The Duke Lacrosse hoax/attempted frame. In particular, read here and here how 88 Duke faculty racists, from programs like Cultural Anthropology, History, Sociology, African and African-American Studies, and Women's Studies, many of them academic frauds, formed a media lynch mob (example) against three white lacrosse players accused of a rape that never even happened. Read here about the egregious bias of many major media outlets, with the New York Times in a leading role. See Durham-in-Wonderland for much more information about many aspects of the case.
  • Partners in Hate: Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers, Noam Chomsky's politics exposed by Werner Cohn, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of British Columbia.
  • Chomsky Lies (about the Pol Pot genocide in Cambodia). Further documentation is in Chapter 3 of an undergraduate honors thesis in political science by Cambodian refugee Sophal Ear. Contrast what Noam Chomsky wrote with first person accounts of what really happened in Cambodia.
• Exposing pseudoscience, antiscience, and other superstitions:
  • See the intellectual bankruptcy of postmodern "cultural studies of science" exposed by physicist Alan Sokal.
  • Quackwatch: the lowdown on alternative medicine.
  • An Index to Creationist Claims (at The TalkOrigins Archive). This site does for creationism (but on a much smaller scale) what Quackwatch does for alternative medicine. (The site does have a link to a book.)
  • Please let me know about sites that expose other widespread pseudoscientific superstitions.
• Computing and the internet:
  • Stop junk email. Help CAUCE (the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email) support H.R. 1748, "The Netizens Protection Act of 1997" (the "Smith Bill", by Rep. Christopher Smith, R-NJ). Here are collections of spam I have received: page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4, page 5, and page 6. Please don't do business with these people or support their political causes. Here I single out some particularly persistent spammers:
    • "Jay Wise, Textbook Reusers".
    • The Copy Shop.
    • WSEAS (World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society).
    • For gratisweb.com.
    Here is a spam experiment.
  • Safe Computing. The author of that page uses Windows, but here is an easy summary of something that is a bit more drastic and covers most of the points made: Don't use anything from Microsoft; don't use an email program which understands either attachments or html; turn off all outside access to your computer (file sharing, etc.); and always run web browsers with cookies, java, and javascript turned off, and so that they don't automatically open things like Microsoft Word documents.
  • Virus hoaxes: Please don't recirculate email messages warning about these nonexistent viruses.
• Oregon weather and Eugene weather (from a source that hasn't spammed me).

Normally, I read plain text (US 7 bit ASCII) only. In particular:

• No binary files or attachments (except by prior arrangement).
• No Microsoft Word files. I do not accept these under any circumstances, since I don't have software that reads them. (See Please don't send Word Documents by email! and We Can Put an End to Word Attachments.) If you really want to send something in a word processor format, use TeX (Wikipedia entry).
• No html encoded (web page format, or "styled") messages. See "Configuring Mail Clients to Send Plain ASCII Text" for how to turn off html. While primarily about something else, this UO page also explains how to turn off html in some common email programs, and points out that this is "a generally useful and courteous thing to do".
• No mime encoding or other encoding of ordinary text messages.

Last significant change: 25 March 2007. (Changes to the list of other links at the bottom are not considered "significant".)