Category Archives: Uncategorized

The news this evening that Russia is sending troops into the Eastern Ukraine and in effect announcing annexation of at least part of the Ukraine carries extremely disturbing implications for the whole world. On a much more minor scale of … Continue reading →

Various items that may be of interest: Robbert Dijkgraaf was sworn in a few days ago as Minister of Education, Culture and Science in the Dutch government. Unclear who if anyone is director of the IAS at the moment, but … Continue reading →

Yet more math items: First of all, congratulations to my colleague Johan de Jong, recipient of the 2022 AMS Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition. Johan’s Stacks Project is very much deserving of such recognition. It’s both huge in scale and … Continue reading →

First some math news: An anonymous commenter claims here that the 2026 ICM will take place in Philadelphia. I had heard that a US group was submitting a proposal, so this rumor is plausible. Many mathematicians and physicists have signed … Continue reading →

A couple months ago I recorded a podcast with Lex Fridman, it’s now available here. A lot of Fridman’s other interviews are well worth watching or listening to, and I thought we had an interesting conversation. I can’t stand listening … Continue reading →

During recent travels I attended two conferences (in Paris and Berkeley) and met up with quite a few people. At the Paris conference I gave an intentionally provocative talk to the philosophers of physics there, slides are here. The argument … Continue reading →

First some personally relevant items: I finally have a finished version 2.0 of my euclidean twistor unification paper (discussed here), it’s uploaded to the arXiv, should appear there Monday. I’ll be giving a talk October 30th at the Foundations 2021 … Continue reading →

I just noticed that Gordon Kane has recently published a second edition of his 2017 String Theory and the Real World. Columbia doesn’t seem to yet have full online access to the second edition, but one can already compare the … Continue reading →

First some items on the mathematics side: The latest AMS Notices has some memorial pieces about Vaughan Jones and Robert Hermann. I contributed a piece to the Hermann memorial, for more about him, see here. If you read French you … Continue reading →