We prove that there exists uncountably many pairwise disjoint open subsets of the Gelfand space of the measure algebra on any locally compact non-discrete abelian group which shows that this space is not separable (in fact, we prove this assertion for the ideal $M_{0}(G)$ consisting of measures with Fourier-Stieltjes transforms vanishing at infinity which is a stronger statement). As a corollary, we obtain that the spectras of elements in the algebra of measures cannot be recovered from the image of one countable subset of the Gelfand space under Gelfand transform, common for all elements in the algebra.

Starting with a commutative ring $R$ and an ideal $I$ , it is possible to define a family of rings $R(I)_{a,b}$ , with $a,b \in R$ , as quotients of the Rees algebra $\oplus_{n \geq0} I^{n}t^{n}$ ; among the rings appearing in this family we find Nagata’s idealization and amalgamated duplication. Many properties of these rings depend only on $R$ and $I$ and not on $a$ , $b$ ; in this paper we show that the Gorenstein and the almost Gorenstein properties are independent of $a$ , $b$ . More precisely, we characterize when the rings in the family are Gorenstein, complete intersection, or almost Gorenstein and we find a formula for the type.

We construct a counterexample to the conjugacy of maximal abelian diagonalizable subalgebras in extended affine Lie algebras.

We prove the BMV (Bessis, Moussa, Villani, [1]) conjecture, which states that the function $${t \mapsto \mathop{\rm Tr}\exp(A-tB)}$$ , $${t \geqslant 0}$$ , is the Laplace transform of a positive measure on [0,∞) if$A$and$B$are $${n \times n}$$ Hermitian matrices and$B$is positive semidefinite. A semi-explicit representation for this measure is given.

We present a version of a proof by Andy Chermak of the existence and uniqueness of centric linking systems associated with arbitrary saturated fusion systems. This proof differs from the one in [Ch2] in that it is based on the computation of derived functors of certain inverse limits. This leads to a much shorter proof, but one which is aimed mostly at researchers familiar with homological algebra.