Author Archives: woit

Frenkel on String Theory

Posted on September 20, 2023 by woit

Curt Jaimungal’s Theories of Everything podcast has a new episode featuring a long talk with Edward Frenkel (by the way, I’ll be doing one of these next month). A few months ago I wrote about a Lex Fridman podcast with … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 29 Comments

What Does Spec Z Look Like?

Posted on September 14, 2023 by woit

This week Laurent Fargues has started a series of lectures here at Columbia on Some new geometric structures in the Langlands program. Videos are available here, but unfortunately there is a problem with the camera in that room, making the … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands | 24 Comments

Various and Sundry

Posted on August 24, 2023 by woit

The math department at Columbia this fall will be hosting three special lecture series, each with some connection to physics (at least in my mind…): Sergiu Klainerman will be lecturing on the proof of nonlinear stability for slowly rotating black … Continue reading →

Posted in abc Conjecture, Uncategorized | 13 Comments

The Philosophy of Supersymmetry

Posted on August 16, 2023 by woit

A few months back I saw a call for papers for a volume on “Establishing the philosophy of supersymmetry”. For a while I was thinking of writing something, since the general topic of supersymmetry is a complex and interesting one, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 23 Comments

Strings 2023

Posted on July 28, 2023 by woit

For much of the past week, I’ve been attending off and on (on Zoom) the Strings 2023 conference. This year it’s in a hybrid format, with 200 participants in person at the Perimeter Institute, and another 1200 or so on … Continue reading →

Posted in Strings 2XXX | 18 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on July 18, 2023 by woit

Nanopoulos and co-authors have predictions from superstring theory that are “in strong agreement with NANOGrav data.” He has been at this now for almost 40 years. See for instance Experimental Predictions from the Superstring from 1985, where the superstring predicted … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 11 Comments

Understanding Confinement

Posted on July 12, 2023 by woit

This week and next there’s an interesting summer school going on at the IAS, with topic Understanding Confinement. Videos of talks are available here or at the IAS video site. Taking a look at some of the first talks brings … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Relative Langlands Duality

Posted on July 10, 2023 by woit

For several years now, David Ben-Zvi, Yiannis Sakellaridis and Akshay Venkatesh have been working on a project involving a relative version of Langlands duality, which among many other things provides a perspective on L-functions and periods of automorphic forms inspired … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands | 4 Comments

Million Dollar Prize for Scholze and Stix

Posted on July 7, 2023 by woit

At a news conference in Tokyo today there evidently were various announcements made about IUT, the most dramatic of which was a 140 million yen (roughly one million dollar) prize for a paper showing a flaw in the claimed proof … Continue reading →

Posted in abc Conjecture | 40 Comments

The Work of Robert Langlands

Posted on July 6, 2023 by woit

This is more of an advertisement than a blog post. This evening on the arXiv James Arthur has posted a wonderful 204 page document explaining the work of Robert Langlands, written in conjunction with the award of the Abel Prize … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands | 1 Comment