Category Archives: Uncategorized

Some Math/Physics Items

Posted on October 25, 2025 by woit

A few quick math/physics items (OK, mostly math…): Contributions to next year’s ICM have already been written up by many speakers, and posted on the arXiv. Try this link to find them. There’s a wonderful new result from Kevin Costello … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands, Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Two Number Theory Items (and Woody Allen)

Posted on September 20, 2025 by woit

James Douglas Boyd has recently spent a lot of time interacting with Mochizuki and others at RIMS working in anabelian geometry. Material from interviews he conducted are available here (Mochizuki on IUT) and here (on anabelian geometry at RIMS). He … Continue reading →

Posted in abc Conjecture, Uncategorized | 18 Comments

Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

Posted on September 11, 2025 by woit

For a long time now fundamental theoretical physics has been suffering not just from a slowdown in progress, but from a sort of intellectual collapse (I wrote about this here a while back in the context of “epistemic collapse”: the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 77 Comments

Bad Craziness

Posted on August 28, 2025 by woit

Given the ever more obvious case that genocide is going on in Gaza, I had been thinking that Scott Aaronson’s going quiet on the issue meant that he was starting to realize that this had become indefensible. Turns out I … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 90 Comments

Pet Peeves

Posted on August 13, 2025 by woit

It’s getting hard to wake up every day, read the latest news of the slaughter of civilians in Gaza and the plans to finish off or exile the rest, then go through the two ID checks at the campus gate … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 47 Comments

Various and Sundry

Posted on July 31, 2025 by woit

Some random things that may be of interest: Ethan Siegel has a discussion of “vibe physics“, people convincing themselves that they can solve fundamental scientific problems by chatting with an LLM. For a story about one billionaire doing this, see … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 25 Comments

Mathematicians interact with AI, July 2025 update

Posted on July 4, 2025 by Aravind Asok

This is a guest post from Aravind Asok1. If you have comments about this, you can contact him at asok@usc.edu. We’ll see if there’s some way to later post moderated comments here. Recently, several symposia have been organized in which … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Mathematicians interact with AI, July 2025 update

Notes on Epistemic Collapse

Posted on June 27, 2025 by woit

For a long time I’ve been having difficulty making sense for myself of a lot of what is going on in the world around me. Recently I’ve found that a useful way of understanding some otherwise baffling things is as … Continue reading →

Posted in The Situation at Columbia, Uncategorized | 60 Comments

The Situation at Columbia XXVI

Posted on June 25, 2025 by woit

There are some unusual things going on here today. The central university computer system has been having outages since Monday night. No news on the source of these, but this just came in: CUIT has been working around the clock … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Various and Sundry

Posted on June 23, 2025 by woit

First of all, three new books of interest: Jesper Grimstrup has written a book titled The Ant Mill: how theoretical high-energy physics descended into groupthink, tribalism, and mass production of research. There’s a lot more about the book at his … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments