I really don't think any good or useful could come out of such a standard...
I sat through a plenary talk in a conference with a Fields medal recipient sitting right beside me. The speaker was very much aware of his (rather imposing!) presence---we were sitting on the front row---and, after the initial minutes one could say that he was talking to the medalist. Now, after a good 30 minutes the said medalist asks me very quietly «do you know what some-concept-or-other is? I think I am being supposed to know about it...» I remember pondering at that moment the fact that I had taught a class recently to undergrads about that and, to be honest, the incident managed to considerably increase my respect for the guy.
manpreet![Tuteehub forum best answer]()
Best Answer
2 years ago
(Feel free to close this if it is too vague/chatty/soft/etc, I won't be offended!)
Some very quick background. I am a visitor this year at some university, and they have very kindly organized a number of events for all "temporary" people (so postdocs and visitors such as myself mainly). Some of these events are social, but I want to talk about the "Colloquium" which we run (mostly between us though some extra people show up). I want to talk about the difficulty we have to understand each other.
Apart from being the "temporary" people, on a mathematical level we have little in common. I am deeply frustrated by how little we are able to share in the colloquium.
The first talk was about number theory, modular forms in particular. The first sentence was "as you know the Galois group is profinite, that is, compact and totally disconnected". The PDE people in the audience rolled their eyes, as you can imagine, and pretty much stopped listening after this one sentence.
We talked about this, and the next speaker decided he'd keep things very basic. He gave a talk on PDEs, and I was only able to follow about 10 minutes. Which is terrible.
When it was my turn, I tried to do something about the quadratic reciprocity law (in fact based on a MO question!). It's not for me to say how it went, but I remember being in shock at some point: I was saying "this set