Category Archives: Uncategorized

This fall I’m teaching on quantum mechanics for mathematicians, at the undergraduate level. There’s a web-page with more information here. I’ll be writing up lecture notes, which should appear on that web-page as the course goes on, starting Wednesday. We’ll … Continue reading →

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long story about the Templeton Foundation, entitled The Templeton Effect. Much of it is about various subfields of philosphy where Templeton money has been successful at bringing religion, theological concerns and religious philosophers … Continue reading →

Some links of mathematical interest that I’ve recently run across: The life and work of Alexander Grothendieck is one of the great stories of modern mathematics. Winfried Scharlau’s first volume of a biography of Grothendieck, covering the years up to … Continue reading →

Via the Quantum Pontiff, news that the Simons Foundation will be providing up to \$300,000 in financial support to the arXiv for each of the next five year. Last year, the arXiv announced a \$60K planning grant from Simons. Now … Continue reading →

This post was originally going to be just about the latest SUSY exclusion results announced at SUSY 2012 and their significance, but I realized there’s nothing much new to say, and it would be tedious to just write the same … Continue reading →

Gerard ’t Hooft in recent years has been pursuing some idiosyncratic ideas about quantum mechanics; for various versions of these, see papers like this, this, this and this. His latest version is last month’s Discreteness and Determinism in Superstrings, which … Continue reading →

There’s an interview with the CERN director here. John Preskill and others at the Caltech Institute for Quantum Information and Mattter now have a blog here. The usual summer workshop on math and physics at Stony Brook is now running … Continue reading →

Around the time of the Higgs discovery announcement last month I was contacted by someone from the Italian left-wing newspaper Il Manifesto, who asked if I’d write something for them about the Higgs. I told them that it would be … Continue reading →

I’ve checked the date on this, and it’s not April 1, so maybe this is actually true. According to the website of the Russian television news network RT, James Cameron to produce story of reclusive Russian genius: Celebrated Russian mathematician … Continue reading →

Vladimir Voevodsky is a mathematics professor at the IAS in Princeton, most famous for his proof of the Bloch-Kato conjecture, work which won him a Fields Medal in 2002. This conjecture relates the K-theory of fields and their étale cohomology … Continue reading →