Author Archives: woit

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

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

Posted on July 3, 2023 by woit

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?

Posted on July 2, 2023 by woit

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

Posted on June 30, 2023 by woit

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

Posted on June 6, 2023 by woit

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

Posted on June 1, 2023 by woit

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