Category Archives: Uncategorized

Podcasts

In case you’re tired of reading me going on about the same topics and instead would like to listen to me going on about such topics, there are now two new options: A couple weeks ago I did a podcast … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Three Mysteries

There’s a well-known list of high-profile problems in fundamental theoretical physics that have gotten most of the attention of the field during the past few decades (examples would be the problems of quantizing gravity, solving QCD, explaining dark energy, finding … Continue reading

Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Uncategorized | 76 Comments

$2 Million For The Nature of Time

FQXI has just announced that it will be awarding another series of large grants, of size \$50K-\$100K, totaling about \$2 million. These grants will be targeted at research into “The Nature of Time.” Initial proposals are due June 14, grants … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Short Items

Planning on getting back to writing some longer postings, but for today, here’s a collection of quick news and links: I hear from number theorists that Princeton’s Manjul Bhargava has some breakthrough results on the ranks of elliptic curves. I … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 25 Comments

More Prizes

As far as I can tell, it’s still unclear if Perelman will accept the $1 million Millennium prize awarded to him last week. This week brings news of two more million dollar prizes: John Tate is this year’s winner of … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Millennium Prize to Perelman

The Clay Mathematics Institute announced today the award of the Millennium Prize to Perelman for the proof of the Poincare Conjecture. The award was made based on the rules set up when the prize was created: a Special Advisory Board … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 38 Comments

Short Items

Bill Thurston teams up with Issey Miyake for their fall ready-to-wear collection based on the Geometrization Conjecture (via Quomodocumque). Youtube video here. Why String Theorists Should Switch Fields to Quantum Computing. This month’s AMS Notices has an interview with last … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Top Cites 2009

Travis Brooks of SLAC’s SPIRES database has a blog posting today announcing the availability of various lists of the high energy physics papers most heavily cited during 2009. A full matrix of links to this data is here, data broken … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

Completely Off-Topic

I’m heading off to New Orleans tomorrow morning, will be there for Mardi Gras, back next Wednesday. Light to no blogging for the duration. Since I’m already off-topic, I can’t resist promoting my friend Alexei Karamazov (aka Mark Ettinger)’s show, … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Completely Off-Topic

String Theory for Undergraduates at Brown

A few years ago various US universities decided it was a good idea to offer a course on string theory for undergraduates (see here), but in recent years most of these seem to have been dropped from the curriculum. Brown … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 48 Comments