Author Archives: woit

Complexifying the Complex

Posted on June 11, 2026 by woit

I’ve been working recently on trying to understand exactly how Wick rotation works in two-dimensional conformal field theory. There is an analog there of some of the issues with Wick rotation of spinors and twistors in four dimensions that I’ve … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

The First AI QFT Textbook

Posted on June 7, 2026 by woit

The first surprise of this afternoon was finally finding an informed and sensible discussion of the implications of AI agents for hep-th research, in the form of a twitter thread by stringking42069. The second was learning from the twitter thread … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

The Only Game in Town

Posted on June 5, 2026 by woit

Warning: if you follow this blog, you’ve heard this many times before, so can move on to something more interesting now. There’s a video conversation between Brian Greene and Lenny Susskind from last week here. At 44:02, Susskind has this … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

The Floer Jungle

Posted on June 5, 2026 by woit

There’s a remarkable new book out about the life and work of Andreas Floer, entitled The Floer Jungle, co-written by writer Siobhan Roberts (author of some great biographies of mathematicians) and mathematician Helmut Hofer. Hofer has also given talks recently … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews | 1 Comment

End of Civilization News

Posted on June 2, 2026 by woit

The big AI/math news is the release today of the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. It’s an excellent attempt to identify the new threats to the intellectual culture of the mathematics community and begin a discussion of what … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 29 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on May 15, 2026 by woit

The usual string theory hype machine in action: to celebrate a PRL publication, a university press office puts out a press release full of hype with a highly misleading title (“string theory is uniquely derived from basic assumptions about the … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 4 Comments

Some Notes on AI

Posted on May 1, 2026 by woit

This posting is mainly intended to provide some links to material about AI in math and physics that I’ve found interesting. I confess that to a large degree I’m trying to avoid seriously learning about exactly what is going on, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 25 Comments

Wick Rotating Spinors and Twistors

Posted on April 17, 2026 by woit

A couple weeks ago I gave at talk in Marseille on the general topic of Wick Rotating Spinors and Twistors. I’ll make a few comments here on the content of the slides. The idea of the talk was to explain … Continue reading →

Posted in Euclidean Twistor Unification | 6 Comments

Langlands Program 2.0

Posted on March 29, 2026 by woit

Yesterday I was at Peter Scholze’s Seminaire Bourbaki talk, his write-up is available here. It was advertised as an exposition of the recent proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture, but Pierre Colmez accurately describes it as something much more: the … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands | 7 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on March 23, 2026 by woit

Natalie Wolchover at Quanta has an article about a campaign by string theorists to argue that we have to accept string theory as our theory of fundamental physics even though there is no evidence for it because it is “unique”, … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 7 Comments