Category Archives: Uncategorized

Last March an Oscar-style ceremony hosted by Morgan Freeman was held in Geneva (see here) to award the 2013 \$3 million Milner Prize to Princeton string theorist Alexander Polyakov. Tomorrow an even more lavish ceremony designed to turn “Oscars of … Continue reading →

This week the Simons Center is hosting a workshop on “The Geometry and Physics of Scattering Amplitudes”, talks are available here. Last week they (and the YITP) held a one-day symposium on Trees, loops and precision QCD, based around the … Continue reading →

The Guardian has an interesting piece about Peter Higgs, evidently their reporter talked to him on his way to the Nobel Prize ceremonies this week in Stockholm. Higgs will be speaking tomorrow (Sunday), and I’m curious to hear what he … Continue reading →

The last posting here was about an unusually collaborative effort among mathematicians, whereas this one is about the opposite, an unusually contentious situation surrounding important recent mathematical progress. What’s at issue is the proof of what has become known as … Continue reading →

There’s a new paper out on the arXiv last night, Small gaps between primes, by James Maynard, which brings the bound on the size of gaps between primes down to 600. This uses some new methods, beating out the Polymath8 … Continue reading →

Philip Anderson’s 90th birthday is coming up next month, and Princeton will host a workshop commemorating the event. Witten and Wilczek will give talks on the Anderson-Higgs mechanism, for which Anderson recently was not awarded a Nobel Prize (for the … Continue reading →

Mathematician Sasha Beilinson has a letter to the editor in this month’s AMS Notices calling on the AMS to sever all ties with the NSA (right now it manages NSA grants, and runs ads from the NSA in the Notices). … Continue reading →

I’m now back to regular internet access, in London for a few days after a trip to East Africa, where I managed to see the November 3 total solar eclipse through light clouds from a location in Northern Uganda. From … Continue reading →

Well, maybe one more before I leave… Tom Siegfried, last heard from telling us that Belief in multiverse requires exceptional vision, now has two new pieces at Science News (here and here) arguing that the failure of the LHC to … Continue reading →

In a few days I’m heading to East Africa for a couple-week long trip, planning to be in Uganda on November 3 for the (short) total solar eclipse that day. This will be followed by a few days in London, … Continue reading →