It is possible to solve the Einstein constraint equations as an evolutionary rather than an elliptic system. Here we consider the Gauss constraint in electrodynamics as a toy model for this. We use a combination of the evolutionary method with the gluing construction to produce initial data for an electromagnetic pulse surrounded by vacuum. It turns out that solving the evolutionary form of the constraint is straightforward, and explicitly yields the desired type of initial data. In contrast, proving the existence of a solution to the same problem within the elliptic setting requires sophisticated arguments based on functional analysis

The notion of SIC-POVMs comes from quantum theory, and they were not on the horizon when I was Lars Brink’s student in the early 1980s. In the summer of 2022, I told Lars that I know how to use number theoretical insights to construct SIC-POVMs in any Hilbert space of dimension n²+3, and that the construction provides a geometric setting for some deep number theoretical conjectures. I will give a sketch of this development, of what it was like to be Lars’ student, and of what his reaction to our construction was.

A SIC is a maximal equiangular tight frame in a finite dimensional Hilbert space. Given a SIC in dimension d, there is good evidence that there always exists an aligned SIC in dimension d(d - 2), having predictable symmetries and smaller equiangular tight frames embedded in them. We provide a recipe for how to calculate sets of vectors in dimension d(d - 2) that share these properties. They consist of maximally entangled vectors in certain subspaces defined by the numbers entering the d dimensional SIC. However, the construction contains free parameters and we have not proven that they can always be chosen so that one of these sets of vectors is a SIC. We give some worked examples that, we hope, may suggest to the reader how our construction can be improved. For simplicity we restrict ourselves to the case of odd dimensions. 

In complex vector spaces maximal sets of equiangular lines, known as SICs, are related to real quadratic number fields in a dimension dependent way. If the dimension is of the form n^2+3, the base field has a fundamental unit of negative norm, and there exists a SIC with anti-unitary symmetry. We give eight examples of exact solutions of this kind, for which we have endeavoured to make them as simple as we can---as a belated reply to the referee of an earlier publication, who claimed that our exact solution in dimension 28 was too complicated to be fit to print. An interesting feature of the simplified solutions is that the components of the fiducial vectors largely consist of algebraic units.

The problem of constructing maximal equiangular tight frames or SICs was raised by Zauner in 1998. Four years ago it was realized that the problem is closely connected to a major open problem in number theory. We discuss why such a connection was perhaps to be expected, and give a simplified sketch of some developments that have taken place in the past 4 years. The aim, so far unfulfilled, is to prove existence of SICs in an infinite sequence of dimensions. 

The Hawking energy has a monotonicity property under the inverse mean curvature flow on totally umbilic hypersurfaces with constant scalar curvature in Einstein spaces. It grows if the hypersurface is spacelike, and decreases if it is timelike. Timelike examples include Minkowski and de Sitter hyperboloids, and photon surfaces in Schwarzschild.

It is known how to choose initial data for Einstein's equations describing an arbitrary number of black holes at a moment of time symmetry. This idea has been used to give insight into the cosmological averaging problem. We study the local curvature of the initial data space, for configurations of 8, 120, or 600 black holes obtained by choosing points either regularly or randomly on a 3-sphere. We conclude that the asymptotic regions are remarkably close to that of Schwarzschild, while the region in between shows interesting behaviour. The cosmological back reaction as defined in the recent literature is actually a bit smaller for the random configurations.

The existence problem for mutually unbiased bases is an unsolved problem in quantum information theory. A related question is whether every pair of bases admits vectors that are unbiased to both. Mathematically this translates to the question whether two Lagrangian Clifford tori intersect, and a body of results exists concerning it. These results are however rather weak from the point of view of the first problem. We make a detailed study of how the intersections behave in the simplest nontrivial case, that of complex projective 2-space (the qutrit), for which the set of pairs of Clifford tori can be usefully parametrized by the unistochastic subset of Birkhoff's polytope. Pairs that do not intersect transversally are located. Some calculations in higher dimensions are included to see which results are special to the qutrit.

Algebraic number theory relates SIC-POVMsin dimension d > 3 to those in dimension d(d - 2). We define a SIC in dimension d(d - 2) to be aligned to a SIC in dimension d if and only if the squares of the overlap phases in dimension d appear as a subset of the overlap phases in dimension d(d - 2) in a specifiedway. We give 19 (mostly numerical) examples of aligned SICs. We conjecture that given any SIC in dimension d, there exists an aligned SIC in dimension d(d - 2). In all our examples, the aligned SIC has lower dimensional equiangular tight frames embedded in it. If d is odd so that a natural tensor product structure exists, we prove that the individual vectors in the aligned SIC have a very special entanglement structure, and the existence of the embedded tight frames follows as a theorem. If d - 2 is an odd prime number, we prove that a complete set of mutually unbiased bases can be obtained by reducing an aligned SIC to this dimension.