Category Archives: Uncategorized

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Expanding Crackpottery

Lubos Motl is getting rather concerned (yes, I know about what pops up when I link to his blog…) about recent trends in theoretical physics, especially the implications of recent work (discussed here) of well-known string theorist Erik Verlinde. He … Continue reading

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Various and Sundry

Now that the plan for running the LHC over the next few years is in place, one can start to get an idea of what new physics might emerge from it between now and 2013. For the question of the … Continue reading

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Particle Theory Job Market

Erich Poppitz has updated his statistics on the high energy theory job market to include data from 2009. He counts hirings to tenure-track faculty jobs, using data from the Theoretical Particle Physics Jobs Rumor Mill. For 2009, out of 12 … Continue reading

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Are There Cosmic Microwave Anomalies?

No. The WMAP team has just released a new set of papers based upon seven years of data from their experiment. For a summary of how this new data has sharpened some of their previous results, see the Cosmological Interpretation … Continue reading

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Physics of the Universe Summit

The New York Times today reports on a Physics of the Universe Summit held a week or so ago in LA. According to the Times, participants stayed at “a Hollywood hotel known long ago as the ‘Riot Hyatt,’ for the … Continue reading

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