Category Archives: Uncategorized

In recent years I’ve found there’s no point to trying to have an intelligible argument about “string theory”, simply because the term no longer has any well-defined meaning. At the KITP next spring, there will be a program devoted to … Continue reading →

This semester I’m teaching the second half of our graduate course on Lie groups and representations, and have started making plans for the course, which will begin next week. There’s a web-page here which I’ll be adding to as time … Continue reading →

Earlier this year I bought a copy of the recently published version of Grothendieck’s Récoltes et Semailles, and spent quite a lot of time reading it. I wrote a bit about it here, intended to write something much longer when … Continue reading →

If you’re sick of hearing about bogus wormholes, here are some other random topics: There’s a SCOAP3 for books initiative, lots of textbooks in the field of particle physics now made open access and available here. It’s completely mysterious to … Continue reading →

This is something I wrote back in June, for context see the next posting. First of all, there’s the following, which is not strictly scientific, but very relevant to how one decides to evaluate progress in a subject. The Maldacena … Continue reading →

I noticed yesterday a website named Math Job Rumors that has been operating for a couple months. No idea what the story behind it is other than that it’s clearly a descendant of Economics Job Market Rumors, which had some … Continue reading →

Guangyu Xu, a student just finishing his Ph.D. at the Centre for Particle Physics at Durham University, recently sent me a public letter he wrote, explaining the story of his job search, in hopes that it might be useful to … Continue reading →

A couple weeks ago rumors were circulating that Yitang Zhang was claiming a proof of a longstanding open conjecture in number theory, the “no Landau-Siegel zeros” conjecture. Such a proof would be a very major new result. Zhang was a … Continue reading →

The arXiv today has a very comprehensive survey of a conventional point of view on where “Physical Mathematics” is in 2022 and where it is going, written by a group of six authors. “Physical Mathematics” is a term popularized by … Continue reading →

There’s a long interview with David E. Kaplan (not the same person as David B. Kaplan…) by David Zierler at the AIP Oral Histories site. The whole thing is quite interesting and I recommend reading it, but I do want … Continue reading →