Category Archives: Uncategorized

Alexander Grothendieck’s 80th birthday was this past March, and the September Notices of the AMS has several articles about his later years. There’s a long piece entitled Who is Grothendieck?, by Winfried Scharlau, who is writing a three-volume biography. The … Continue reading →

Things don’t seem to be going well these days for string theory in the “marketplace of ideas”. From an article about gasoline-saving pedals: The 1990’s were the host of many great fads. Furby, Tamagachis, string theory, the examples are as … Continue reading →

Today’s “Science Saturday” on Bloggingheads features me and Sabine Hossenfelder, supposedly talking about What’s wrong with string theory. Actually, we both agreed that we were pretty tired of that topic, so tried to discuss some more interesting related issues we … Continue reading →

The Canadian press today is putting out the story that Stephen Hawking may be abandoning Cambridge to move permanently to the Perimeter Institute, where he would join recently appointed director Neil Turok, as well as Lenny Susskind. From the stories … Continue reading →

This week’s New Yorker has a quite good article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells entitled “Surfing the Universe” about Garrett Lisi and the controversy generated last year by his paper An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything (which I wrote about here). Unfortunately … Continue reading →

Some quick links: The Clay Mathematics Institute is now making available for free online the books whose publication it has sponsored. These include the Morgan-Tian exposition of the proof of the Poincare conjecture. Surveys in Non-commutative geometry, which contains two … Continue reading →

Several things have come up recently that brought up the year 1985, the year the film “Back to the Future” came out. This summer the IAS will be running a two-week program at the IAS on Strings and Phenomenology, designed … Continue reading →

Sticking with the theme of the Riemann Hypothesis, the AMS has recently posted some articles to appear in an upcoming issue of the AMS Bulletin, one of which contains a long interview with Atle Selberg, who died last summer at … Continue reading →

Last night a preprint by Xian-Jin Li appeared on the arXiv, claiming a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis. Preprints claiming such a proof have been pretty common, and always wrong. Most of them are obviously implausible, invoking a few pages … Continue reading →

This week there’s a Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, devoted to physics. Many of the talks can be viewed on-line. From 3-5pm today (Lindau time) there will be a session devoted to a panel discussion of expectations for the LHC. … Continue reading →