Author Archives: woit

After more than three months of effort to try and get an answer about this, I’ve finally heard officially from the arXiv that trackbacks to my weblog are currently not being allowed by the moderators. I’m sending the following message … Continue reading →

The new Center for the Topology and Quantization of Moduli Spaces (CTQM) at Aarhus University wins my award for the most specialized pure mathematics institute. It will be hosting an opening symposium in a couple weeks featuring several talks that … Continue reading →

There’s a remarkable new paper out from Shing-Tung Yau, entitled Perspectives on Geometric Analysis. Yau is probably the dominant figure in the field of Geometric Analysis in recent years, and in this paper he gives his personal perspective on the … Continue reading →

Lubos Motl has a posting announcing that Terence Tao will be one of the 2006 Fields Medalists. The announcement of the Fields medals is officially made at the time of the International Congress of Mathematicians, which this year will be … Continue reading →

The last couple days have seen a new phenomenon, which may or may not be some sort of sign of the times. Two different papers appearing on the arXiv contain references to blog postings: 1. In last night’s Cosmological Constant … Continue reading →

This is about the sixth week in a row that the Sunday New York Times Book Review has had something about string theory or the Landscape controversy. It has become the main place in the popular press to follow this. … Continue reading →

Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog have a new paper out, called Populating the Landscape: A Top Down Approach. It contains his version of the anthropic landscape idea, based on his “no-boundary” idea of quantum cosmology (sometimes also referred to as … Continue reading →

Various things from the past couple days related to Susskind, the Landscape, and his book The Cosmic Landscape: The paper Computational Complexity of the Landscape I by Frederik Denef and Michael Douglas is out. They show that even in simplified … Continue reading →

There’s a beautiful survey paper about elliptic cohomology that Jacob Lurie, an AIM 5-year fellow in the math department at Harvard, has recently put on his home page. This paper has been discussed a bit already by David Corfield and … Continue reading →