The blog posts I have written.https://idrissi.eu/enhttps://idrissi.eu/post/git-3b-practice/https://idrissi.eu/post/git-3b-practice/Nearly five years after Part 3a, it is finally time to make our first commit. The previous post installed Git and either cloned a repository or initialized a…Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/email-hell/https://idrissi.eu/post/email-hell/For a reason I will explain below, I decided to count how many institutional email addresses I have. The answer? I have a whopping ten email addresses, as a…Tue, 23 Nov 2021 11:30:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/arxiv-language-geography/https://idrissi.eu/post/arxiv-language-geography/The policy A recent policy change has caused a minor uproar (is that an oxymoron) in the math community around here. In a blog post from last November, arXiv…Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/sagemath-calculation-massey/https://idrissi.eu/post/sagemath-calculation-massey/Background In my habilitation thesis, I included an appendix that used Mathematica to compute Massey products in the cohomology of configuration spaces of an…Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/iuf-junior/https://idrissi.eu/post/iuf-junior/Today, I received some amazing news: my application to the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) has been accepted! The list of laureates was published today…Thu, 05 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/hdr-defense/https://idrissi.eu/post/hdr-defense/Yesterday (Thursday, May 22nd, 2025), I successfully defended[^1] my "Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches"! I'm very happy about this, obviously; this took a…Fri, 23 May 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/fun-with-dall-e/https://idrissi.eu/post/fun-with-dall-e/You may have heard about DALL-E 2. According to its authors, it "is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural…Sat, 03 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/anr-shocos-accepted/https://idrissi.eu/post/anr-shocos-accepted/Some time ago, I submitted a "Young Researcher" (JCJC) grant proposal to the French National Research Agency (ANR). I was listed as the scientific coordinator…Tue, 05 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/latex-shenanigans/https://idrissi.eu/post/latex-shenanigans/Just for fun, I wrote a small $\LaTeX$ loop to define font-related single-letter commands, such as \cA = \mathcal{A} and so on. It is based on this answer by…Tue, 19 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/mathematica/https://idrissi.eu/post/mathematica/I have been teaching for seven years now. Yet somehow, I started only recently using computer algebra software (CAS) to make live illustrations of mathematical…Mon, 11 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/peccot-accepted/https://idrissi.eu/post/peccot-accepted/In 2020, the Collège de France awarded me the Peccot Lecture and Prize, which "[rewards] promising mathematicians under 30 who have distinguished themselves in…Wed, 26 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/happy-2022/https://idrissi.eu/post/happy-2022/Happy new year everyone! I hope that 2022 will be better than 2020 and 2021. As of December 19th, my university has no name. The Conseil d'État (supreme court…Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/ical-ufr/https://idrissi.eu/post/ical-ufr/For the past couple of months, I have been working on a side project with several colleagues from my department. In short, it's a web interface to our…Thu, 09 Sep 2021 15:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/git-3-practice/https://idrissi.eu/post/git-3-practice/After a long hiatus, here is the third installment of my series of posts about Git for Mathematicians 🙂. I explain the basics of how one would go about using…Fri, 06 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/ec-20-ans/https://idrissi.eu/post/ec-20-ans/(Update 2021) With the switch to React, this chart doesn't work anymore; I will try to make it work with React but I cannot really give any ETA. Recently the…Fri, 21 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/select-exams/https://idrissi.eu/post/select-exams/With online teaching, I have to find ways to make many processes go faster, as otherwise teaching takes an inordinate amount of time compared to traditional…Mon, 19 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/git-2-theory/https://idrissi.eu/post/git-2-theory/This post is the second in a series in which I will try to explain how to use Git to write papers, with an audience of professional mathematicians in mind. The…Mon, 26 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/git-1-preliminaries/https://idrissi.eu/post/git-1-preliminaries/This post is the first in a series in which I will try to explain how to use Git to write papers, with an audience of professional mathematicians in mind. I…Tue, 13 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/exam-template/https://idrissi.eu/post/exam-template/Like many people, I have been teaching online for some time now. In order to help students get an idea of how well they understand the material, I have been…Fri, 20 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/action-so-s-non-formal/https://idrissi.eu/post/action-so-s-non-formal/In this post, I record a simple and probably well-known fact; but since I have to remake the computation again and again (because I forget it...) I thought it…Thu, 17 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/letter-template/https://idrissi.eu/post/letter-template/Several people have asked me for my LaTeX template to write letters, so I guess I might as well put it up on my webpage. It uses the scrlttr2 package. I think…Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/peccot-covid/https://idrissi.eu/post/peccot-covid/Update: The videos are now available on the Collège de France's website! Please go there for the third lecture and there for the fourth lecture. As some of you…Mon, 25 May 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/animation-braid/https://idrissi.eu/post/animation-braid/Thursday I'm giving a talk at the online Toric Topology research seminar. I was supposed to go there in person, but as you can guess, the current pandemic made…Tue, 21 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/animation-peccot/https://idrissi.eu/post/animation-peccot/I am finishing to prepare my Peccot Lectures that start next week. I have prepared a small animation to illustrate the Fulton--MacPherson compactification using…Fri, 28 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/peccot/https://idrissi.eu/post/peccot/Yesterday I received a letter from the Collège de France. I have been selected to give this year a Peccot Lecture, which "rewards each year young mathematicians…Tue, 24 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/digging/https://idrissi.eu/post/digging/I dug up the tiny program I wrote to find minimal surfaces with fixed boundary in 2011 for the "grandes écoles" entrance exams. Ah, the memories... It's…Fri, 15 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/inventiones/https://idrissi.eu/post/inventiones/My second paper, The Lambrechts--Stanley Model of Configuration Space, has been accepted for publication in Inventiones Mathematicae! This is a great honor and…Thu, 22 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/new-beginning/https://idrissi.eu/post/new-beginning/I've been in Paris for almost a month now. It's been great! People at the math department and the math institute[^1] have all been welcoming and have helped me…Wed, 19 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/why-name-paris-7/https://idrissi.eu/post/why-name-paris-7/One question people often ask is why the university is called "Paris 7", followed by the realization that there are (were!) thirteen universities in Paris…Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/next-stop-paris/https://idrissi.eu/post/next-stop-paris/I finally got the confirmation from the ministry: I definitively got the job and I will be appointed in Paris-VII! A new life is about to begin... I've been at…Wed, 20 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/eventful-week/https://idrissi.eu/post/eventful-week/Last week was life-changing, to say the least. I was interviewed for two maître de conférences¹ positions, one in Université Paris Diderot, the other…Sat, 26 May 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/kafka-stars/https://idrissi.eu/post/kafka-stars/This is a cautionary tale, with the hope that this post could help future applicants for permanent academic positions in France. This past month, I've had the…Fri, 16 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/changes/https://idrissi.eu/post/changes/Many changes have happened in my life recently! I defended my doctorate on November 17th. I guess I'm a doctor now! There are too many people to thank for that…Mon, 05 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/model-conf-spaces-2/https://idrissi.eu/post/model-conf-spaces-2/Last week I was at the Max Planck Institute for the Conference for Young researchers in homotopy theory and categorical structures (which was, by the way, a…Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/swiss-cheese-accepted/https://idrissi.eu/post/swiss-cheese-accepted/My paper Swiss-Cheese operad and Drinfeld center has finally been accepted! It is going to appear in the Israel Journal of Mathematics. I've made the few…Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/conf-sp-woes/https://idrissi.eu/post/conf-sp-woes/I've been neglecting this blog a lot. Juggling research, teaching, organizing a seminar, and a personal life leaves little time for writing articles! (Wait…Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/voronov-product/https://idrissi.eu/post/voronov-product/My first real post in a while! It turns out that writing an actual paper (cf. previous blog post) takes a lot of time and effort. Who knew? The Voronov product…Thu, 22 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/mfo/https://idrissi.eu/post/mfo/I just came back from the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach! I was there for the "Factorization Algebras and Functorial Field Theories" workshop. It…Sun, 15 May 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/infinity-operads/https://idrissi.eu/post/infinity-operads/The purpose of this post is to record the definition of ∞-operads and explain why it works like that. For this I'm using Lurie's definition of ∞-operads; there…Fri, 06 May 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/milnor-moore/https://idrissi.eu/post/milnor-moore/This post is about the Milnor--Moore theorem, a powerful tool describing the structure of (co)commutative Hopf algebras. Like the Eckmann--Hilton argument, it…Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/acyclic-models/https://idrissi.eu/post/acyclic-models/The theorem(s) of acyclic models are a rather powerful technique for proving that some functors defined on truncated chain complexes can be extended in higher…Fri, 15 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/abelian-bimodules/https://idrissi.eu/post/abelian-bimodules/This post is about something somewhat weird I noticed about infinitesimal bimodules over operads and their relationships with some $En$ operads. I don't know if…Wed, 06 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://idrissi.eu/post/eckmann-hilton/https://idrissi.eu/post/eckmann-hilton/As promised, this post is about the famous Eckmann--Hilton argument. This argument, on the surface, looks like a simple algebraic trick; but it has deep…Wed, 23 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT