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.

During Fall 2007, I taught part of a course at the Fields Institute on the structure of C*-algebras.

During Winter 2008, I taught two sections of Math 251 (first quarter freshman calculus).

During Spring 2008, I taught Math 243 (statistics for business and social science students) and Math 607 (an advanced graduate course on crossed product C*-algebras). (Huaxin Lin taught the predecessor course in Winter 2008. Note that in some places, the information about who teaches which quarter is wrong.)

For the 2008--2009 academic year, I expect to be 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). There is so far no web page for this course, but the web page for the last time I taught the course is here. It includes real and sample exams and their solutions. Caution: Because of the large size of the Spring 2009 class, a much greater proportion of the exam questions will be multiple choice.

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):

• Common errors in undergraduate mathematics (especially in calculus courses), and Errors made by calculators and computers.
• 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".)