About

I'm Moshe Zadka, also known as "moshez" or "MosheZ" to friends.

I am a programmer who used to be a mathematician. I like pretty much what you would expect me to like — science-fiction, fantasy, comic books, role playing games, space and so on. I currently live in the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area, which is an amazing place to live in.

All links to me are on Cobordism: a list of places which are equivalent to me (in some weak sense).

Some people asked me what an orbifold is. It is hard for me to avoid sounding like a crank on the issue: my position is at odds with the majority of the math community.

As the paper I have co-authored says:

An orbifold is a space that is locally modeled on quotients of R^n by finite linear group actions. The precise definition of its global structure is more complicated. The situation in the literature is somewhat problematic: different authors give definitions that are a priori different from each other, and the relations between them are not made clear. We propose to approach orbifolds through the notion of a diffeology.

The introduction in the paper above, published as Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 362 (2010), 2811-2831, does a good job of introducing the notion of a diffeology, and how to define orbifolds as diffeological spaces.