Blog Profile / Not Even Wrong
| URL : | http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Academics / Physics | |
| Posts on Regator: | 519 | |
| Posts / Week: | 2.2 | |
| Archived Since: | December 12, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Why Author Pays Open Access is a Bad Idea
There’s a wonderful piece of software out there I hadn’t heard about, called Mathgen, which generates impressive looking mathematics research papers that are utter gobbledygook. A Mathgen paper on Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied … Continue reading ?
Fields Medal Symposium
Fields Medal Symposium Ngo children’s book http://english.vietnamnet.vn/en/society/19590/prof–ngo-bao-chau-writes–novel-of-maths-.html Frenkel piece http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-Fifth-problem–math—anti-Semitism-in-the-Soviet-Union-7446 Frenkel AMS notes on beyond endoscopy Derived Geometric Langlands (Arinkin, Gairsgory) Stewart house Video of me
Templeton Funds Physics of Information
FQXi has recently issued a Request for Proposals, using money from the Templeton Foundation to fund about $3 million in grants for research on the “Physics of Information”: What is the relationship between information and reality? Can information exist without … Continue reading ?
Yet More Links
From commenter Clark here, news that Mochizuki has acknowledged that the problem pointed out by Vesselin Dmitrov with his proof of the abc conjecture on MathOverflow is a real one, but claims that the argument can be fixed, with fixes … Continue reading ?
Post-discovery Higgs Books
The Higgs particle has been the main player in various popular books about particle physics since before many of today’s college students were born, with Lederman and Teresi’s The God Particle going back to 1993. Last year’s excellent The Infinity … Continue reading ?
Physics Nobel Prize 2012
I had decided to retire from the Nobel Prize prediction business at the top of my game after my first prediction soon after this blog was started. I haven’t heard anything about what tomorrow’s announcement will be, but did just … Continue reading ?
Physics Frontiers Prize
Yuri Milner’s Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation announced today the process by which future winners of the $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize will be chosen (for more about this, see here), a process which involves setting up yet another prize, the … Continue reading ?
Wide World of Links
Some short items of a wide variety of kinds: Witten has posted to the arXiv a long paper about the work on superstring perturbation theory that he has been doing. Superstring Perturbation Theory Revisited, together with two papers of background … Continue reading ?
PPAP Community Meeting
Following up on last week’s European Strategy Group Meeting in Krakow, this week UK particle physicists are doing something similar, with a Particle Physics Advisory Panel community meeting in Birmingham. The talks on the experimental side tell much the same … Continue reading ?
European Strategy Group Meeting
CERN has a new version of the European Strategy Group (last convened in 2005/6), tasked with updating medium to long-term plans for future accelerators and particle physics in general. This week they’re running an Open Symposium (live webcast here), with … Continue reading ?
Langlands and Twistors?
I just heard about this from George Sparling, who is giving a talk this afternoon with the title “From Roger Penrose to Robert Langlands and back” at a symposium in Pittsburgh. I don’t at all know what this is about, … Continue reading ?
This Week’s Hype
BBC Horizon this week is running an episode How Small is the Universe? with a description that features the usual sort of hype about modern physics: It is a journey where things don’t just become smaller but also a whole … Continue reading ?
Proof of the abc Conjecture?
Jordan Ellenberg at Quomodocumque reports here on a potential breakthrough in number theory, a claimed proof of the abc conjecture by Shin Mochizuki. More than five years ago I wrote a posting with the same title, reporting on a talk … Continue reading ?
Fall Course: Quantum Mechanics for Mathematicians
This fall I’m teaching on quantum mechanics for mathematicians, at the undergraduate level. There’s a web-page with more information here. I’ll be writing up lecture notes, which should appear on that web-page as the course goes on, starting Wednesday. We’ll … Continue reading ?
The Templeton Effect
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long story about the Templeton Foundation, entitled The Templeton Effect. Much of it is about various subfields of philosphy where Templeton money has been successful at bringing religion, theological concerns and religious philosophers … Continue reading ?
Short Math Links
Some links of mathematical interest that I’ve recently run across: The life and work of Alexander Grothendieck is one of the great stories of modern mathematics. Winfried Scharlau’s first volume of a biography of Grothendieck, covering the years up to … Continue reading ?
Simons Foundation and the arXiv
Via the Quantum Pontiff, news that the Simons Foundation will be providing up to $300,000 in financial support to the arXiv for each of the next five year. Last year, the arXiv announced a $60K planning grant from Simons. Now … Continue reading ?
Linde on Inflation and the Multiverse
Andrei Linde is one of Yuri Milner’s $3 million dollar men, best known for his “chaotic inflation” version of inflationary theory, as well as being one of the main proponents of anthropic multiverse mania. There’s a long piece based on … Continue reading ?
Bill Thurston, 1946-2012
Bill Thurston passed away yesterday, at the age of 65, after a battle with melanoma. Thurston was for many years the dominant figure in the study of 3 dimensional topology and geometry, winning a Fields medal for this work in … Continue reading ?
This Week’s Hype
The Higgs suggests that there could be more dimensions of space-time than we previously thought. From a New Yorker piece this week (subscription required) about Joe Incandela of CMS and the Higgs discovery. Even the famed New Yorker fact-checkers are … Continue reading ?