about me
I am Leona Mollica, a Bay Area transplant with interests in philosophy, logic, cats, calligraphy, and tenants' rights. This site is for coordinating news about my (modest) public life.
Stay safe! :)
a marvelous series of coincidences
I have been very gradually dipping my toes into group theory recently, which has been interesting but quite outside my comfort zone.
One really enthralling theorem I came across recently was the existence and uniqueness of an outer automorphism on the symmetry group on six elements (that is, roughly, an automorphism of the group of permutations of six elements that does not come for free from conjugating by some fixed permutation). It is an exceptional automorphism: no other symmetry group possesses an outer automorphism, and the sixth has only the one. This is a quite old theorem (proved in 1895 by Otto Hölder), and not very complicated to prove, but I still find it deeply charming.
There is something remarkable and captivating about it. The way it relies on all these coincidences about n=6 to line up just so (chiefly, the equal number of the two-element subsets of a six-sized set on the one hand and its partitions into such two-element subsets on the other: 15), and the fact that there was such a strange and complex double aspect hiding all along in as familiar and deceptively simple a creature as the different ways of rearranging six arbitrary objects.
It fills me with an evangelising zeal. I strongly recommend that you check out the proof and feel grateful to be alive!
15 Mar 2025
grad school status
I want to clarify my status with regard to grad school, since it may be somewhat unclear to onlookers.
I entered the PhD programme at the University of Pittsburgh philosophy department in fall of 2014, right after finishing my undergrad at Shimer College. I progressed to ABD status by 2018, when I left for Los Angeles to study for a year with the University of Southern California philosophy department. During my time there it became clear my mental health was in too poor shape to finish my PhD at that time. I thus in 2019 requested leave from my programme at Pitt, with the intention of eventually returning. As of now, I am making arrangements with Pitt's department to return to finish up my doctorate. My formal affiliation with Pitt and its philosophy department is, for the time being, lapsed.
1 Mar 2025
selfie
A picture of me, from Alan Witt Park in Fairfield. Taken this summer.
19 Feb 2025
new opinion piece
I have a new opinion piece out in Jacobin arguing that progressives should be cautious about pursuing ballot initiatives, based on the lessons of California (link).