Category Archives: Uncategorized

Frenkel on String Theory

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

Various and Sundry

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

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

Understanding Confinement

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

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

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

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

Kontsevich on the Hodge and Tate conjectures

Yesterday afternoon there was an event at CUNY featuring a panel discussion on Chern-Simons terms. Nothing new there, although it was interesting to hear first-hand from Witten the story of how he came up with the Chern-Simons-Witten theory. One piece … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments