Zachary Porat
A Mostly Mathematical Travelogue
Welcome to my blog! Here, I chronicle my mostly mathematical travels as a grad student studying number theory.
A complete archive of my blog posts can be found here. Copy my RSS feed link to add this blog to your favorite RSS reader: RSS Feed
Below is a map of the places I have been because of math! Click the pins to see what conferences took me where, and find the blog post about that conference if I have one!
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All opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the institutions that I represent.
Being Comfortable with Rejection
Posted on May 4, 2025
I recently returned from a 10-day trip to Denton, TX. The first half of the trip was spent at the 37th Automorphic Forms Workshop and the latter half was spent serving as a project assistant for Arithmetic Geometry at UNT. Fair warning, ten days is a long time to spend anywhere… but ten...
Conferences for Undergraduate Students
Posted on May 1, 2025
A short blog post today to share my experience attending the Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference (HRUMC) for the first time. My primary motivation was to support my DRP mentee, who was giving his very first math talk! (It went well, and I was incredibly proud!) A secondary motivation was the chance to...
Un Week-end Parfait
Posted on October 29, 2024
I recently returned from a weekend in the city of Québec, where I attended the Québec-Maine Number Theory Conference at Université Laval. Before the trip, I expected today’s blog post to be brief. A weekend conference didn’t seem likely to offer a compelling story–let alone one with a moral, as in my previous...
On Meeting Your Idols
Posted on July 27, 2024
If I had to hazard a guess, I would wager that whoever said “Never meet your idols” was not a mathematician. In my previous blog post, I wrote about meeting Barry Mazur for the first time. Despite Professor Mazur being a titan of mathematics, he was warm and kind throughout our interaction. His...
Mazur and Me
Posted on July 20, 2024
In 1977, Barry Mazur proved Ogg’s conjecture, showing that the torsion subgroup of the Mordell-Weil group of an elliptic curve over Q must be isomorphic to one of fifteen groups.1 I can’t quite remember when I first saw this statement–it might have been in a plenary talk by Álvaro Lozano-Robledo at the 2019...