Author Archives: woit

Langlands Program and Physics

Posted on December 14, 2004 by woit

One of my minor hobbies over the years has been trying to understand something about the Langlands conjectures in number theory, partly because some of the mathematics that shows up there looks like it might be somehow related to quantum … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands | 31 Comments

Landskepticism

Posted on December 13, 2004 by woit

Tom Banks has a new preprint out, entitled Landskepticism: or Why Effective Potentials Don’t Count String Models. In it he argues against the idea that one can use effective potentials to study the supposed “Landscape” of different vacuum states of … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 31 Comments

Nobel Lectures

Posted on December 10, 2004 by woit

The winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics gave their Nobel lectures in Stockholm on Wednesday. The lectures of David Gross and Frank Wilczek are available on-line, for some reason that of David Politzer isn’t, at least not yet. … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

String Theory, at 20 Explains It All – Not

Posted on December 7, 2004 by woit

This morning’s New York Times has a long and prominently placed article about the 20th anniversary of the “First Superstring Revolution”. The Times has a long history of producing overhyped uncritical articles about string theory, for a classic example, see … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 81 Comments

Shiing-Shen Chern 1911-2004

Posted on December 5, 2004 by woit

Shiing-Shen Chern, one of the great geometers of the twentieth century, died last Friday at Nankai University. He was 93 years old. An article about his life is posted on the web-site of MSRI, the mathematics institute in Berkeley of … Continue reading →

Posted in Obituaries | 26 Comments

String Theory Gets Real – Not

Posted on December 3, 2004 by woit

A recent issue of Science magazine has an article about the “Strings and the Real World” workshop at Aspen this past summer, entitled String Theory Gets Real — Sort Of. A more accurate title for the article might be “String … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Witten Localization

Posted on December 1, 2004 by woit

The second talk I heard yesterday at the Institute was by Chris Woodward from Rutgers. What he was talking about was a conjectural formula whose origins go back to a truly amazing paper by Witten from 1992 entitled Two Dimensional … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Paul Baum on Baum-Connes

Posted on December 1, 2004 by woit

I was down in Princeton at the Institute yesterday and heard two interesting talks. The first was the beginning of a series of four lectures by Paul Baum about the Baum-Connes conjecture, the second was by Chris Woodward about “equivariant … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Review Article About the Poincare Conjecture

Posted on November 30, 2004 by woit

An excellent review article about the state of the proof of the Poincare conjecture by my colleague John Morgan has recently appeared. For more background on this, see an earlier posting. Morgan is a topologist, and his article contains an … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

New U.S. Science Budget

Posted on November 23, 2004 by woit

The U.S. Congress has finally gotten around to producing a budget for fiscal year 2005. Some information about the budget numbers for scientific research is available here and here. The NSF budget for research and related activities is being cut … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments