Talk:George Bergman

suggestions re Wikipedia page about me

I don't think it would be considered appropriate for me to edit the page about myself; but here are some improvements it could use:

The link labeled "Wall Street Journal article, Oct 27, 2009" is dead. (I have no idea what the article it linked to was about.)

The statement that I am "still teaching" is out of date, and the link there to my faculty webpage is irrelevant. I did teach one course per year for several years after retiring, but the last one was in 2017: https://math.berkeley.edu/courses/course-offerings/fall-2017-courses You could verify that I haven't taught since then by entering in the "Search" field on the above page "Bergman courses", but without any quotation marks.

The Wikipedia page gives "the works of James Joyce" as among my interests; but it was a very minor interest. (I had contributed some notes to a website on Joyce that the person who created my people page worked on.) Not worth mentioning.

It also refers to "third-party politics". This is just one of many topics that I have pages on at https://math.berkeley.edu/~gbergman/misc. Whether you want to put in a link to that page is yours to decide, but "third-party politics" is not a special interest; just something I had thoughts on that I recorded there.

Something not mentioned is that I have been the UC Berkeley Math Department photographer since 1968, and have taken pictures of hundreds of faculty who belonged to or visited our department. A large number of these are shown at https://opc.mfo.de/do_extended_search?author=Bergman. A great many of them are used on Wikipedia -- see bottom of https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bergman_2011.jpeg !

(For a few years, George Ho was digitizing old photos of mine to get hi-res versions for Wikipedia, which one could not get by downloading the OPC photos. He switched to other interests; but if anyone else would like to do such digitizing, I'd be happy to send them prints to digitize. I also have hi-res files of almost all the pictures I've taken since 2010.)

In addition to my Diamond Lemma paper, which is referenced, I have recently learned that results in a still earlier paper of mine, "The logarithmic limit-set of an algebraic variety", Trans. A.M.S. 157 (1971) 459-469, have led to concepts called "Bergman complexes" and "Bergman fans". E.g., see https://www.ams.org/journals/tran/2026-379-05/S0002-9947-2026-09492-9/S0002-9947-2026-09492-9.pdf?t=1784136340631 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095895605000687?via%3Dihub https://londmathsoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1112/jlms.70434

(NB: there are other mathematical concepts named after a different Bergman, not me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Bergman#See_also .)

One item that I wish could be on my Wikipedia page, but don't know where to find references to, is the fact that in the summer of 1959, following my junior year of High School, I participated in a National Science Foundation project at UC Berkeley, "Junior Research in Mathematics for undergraduates, secondary school teachers and secondary school students", run by Harley Flanders and Rene de Vogelaere. At the end, I and several others accepted offers by Flanders to get us into UC Berkeley without our going back to high school for our senior year. (Another of the students in the project was Jay Pasachoff, though since he had already finished his senior year of high school and been accepted at Harvard, he didn't go on to Berkeley.) It played a big part in my life, but as I say, I can find no links referring to it.

I will mention, finally, that over the past year I have gotten a large number of emails from people offering to update my Wikipedia page. After I had discussed with the first one changes I thought worth making, he mentioned that he charged a fee; so I turned down his offer, on the understanding the Wikipedia is "maintained by a community of volunteers". I've received many similar offers since, and assumed that they also intended to charge fees, and have not responded. I'd be interested in your advice. If you want names, or copies of the emails I received, I can supply them. ~2026-25698-35 (talk) 21:24, 15 July 2026 (UTC)