Author Archives: woit

Million Dollar Prize for Scholze and Stix

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

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

Physicists Prove That Parallel Worlds Cannot Be Extremely Different From Each Other

Stories about the latest prediction of superstring theory here and here, based on a Tsukuba University press release about this paper. Generally ignoring this kind of nonsense these days, but the new feature of this one is that the press … Continue reading

Posted in This Week's Hype | 4 Comments

A Mathematics AI Factory?

A few days ago I read a fascinating article in New York magazine: Inside the AI Factory, which explained how the very large business of hiring humans to do tasks that generate training data for AI works. One reaction I … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Fantasy, Faith and Physics

No blogging here the past few weeks, partly because I was away on vacation for a little while, but more because there hasn’t been anything I’ve seen worth writing about. Yesterday’s pulsar timing array and IceCube announcements unfortunately didn’t tell … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 14 Comments

Zen University

The establishment of a new university in Japan has been announced, to be called ZEN University. One component of the new university will be the Inter Universal Geometry Center, with Fumiharu Kato as director, Ivan Fesenko as deputy director. The … Continue reading

Posted in abc Conjecture | 17 Comments

From Quantum Mechanics to Number Theory via the Oscillator Representation

This past semester I taught our graduate class on Lie groups and representations, and spent part of the course on the Heisenberg group and the oscillator representation. Since the end of the semester I’ve been trying to clean up and … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Various and Sundry

A few unrelated items: I’ve been hearing from several people about their plans to travel to China this summer, just realized that they’re all going there for the same reason, to participate in the First International Congress of Basic Science. … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 25 Comments

Quantum Supremacy

We’re hearing this week from two very different parts of the string theory community that quantum supremacy (quantum computers doing better than classical computers) is the answer to the challenges the subject has faced. New Scientist has an article Quantum … Continue reading

Posted in Book Reviews, This Week's Hype, Wormhole Publicity Stunts | 29 Comments

string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard

I want to make up for linking to something featuring Michio Kaku yesterday by today linking to the exact opposite, an insightful explanation of the history of string theory, discussing the implications of how it was sold to the public. … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 61 Comments