Category Archives: Uncategorized

Where the Money Comes From

Since returning from a vacation partly spent isolated from the internet, I’ve been catching up and noticed that some of the most prominent sources of funding for math and physics research have been making the news: The New York Times … Continue reading

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Short Items

A few short items: My graduate school roommate Nathan Myhrvold has a new book coming out this month, a five-volume series about the science of bread, based on several years of research into the subject at his laboratory near Seattle. … Continue reading

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50 Years of Electroweak Unification

The 50th anniversary of electroweak unification is coming up in a couple days, since Weinberg’s A Model of Leptons paper was submitted to PRL on October 17, 1967. For many years this was the most heavily cited HEP paper of … Continue reading

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The Big Bang Theory and the Death of SUSY

If you’re a fan of The Big Bang Theory, perhaps you’ve seen the latest episode, The Retraction Reaction. If not, you might be interested in the following transcript (taken from here). The show has always done a good job of … Continue reading

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2017 Nobel Prize in Physics

At this point, Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss of LIGO have (deservedly) won just about every scientific prize out there, for the first observation of gravitational waves. I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t believe they’ll be getting the Physics … Continue reading

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Various and Sundry

I don’t know if I ever mentioned this, but quite a while ago I replaced the “latexrender” TeX plugin being used here by a mathjax one. As I find time, I’m now going back and editing old posts to get … Continue reading

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QCD at $\theta=\pi$

Earlier this week Zohar Komargodski (who is now at the Simons Center) visited Columbia, and gave a wonderful talk on recent work he has been involved in that provides some new insight into a very old question about QCD. Simplifying … Continue reading

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Modern Theories of Quantum Gravity

Quanta magazine today has a column by Robbert Dijkgraaf that comes with the abstract: Reductionism breaks the world into elementary building blocks. Emergence finds the simple laws that arise out of complexity. These two complementary ways of viewing the universe … Continue reading

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Modern Geometry

This semester I’m teaching the first semester of Modern Geometry, our year-long course on differential geometry aimed at our first-year Ph.D. students. A syllabus and some other information about the course is available here. In the spring semester Simon Brendle … Continue reading

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This and That

The Stacks Project (see an earlier post here) had a very successful workshop in Ann Arbor earlier this month. This is a remarkable effort pioneered by Johan de Jong to produce a high quality open source reference for the field … Continue reading

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