Category Archives: Uncategorized

There’s a new magazine aimed at Harvard alums, named 02138 (after the local zip-code), and its second issue has just appeared. Personally I’ve never quite understood the phenomenon of people who retain a lifelong fascination with the fact that they … Continue reading →

The January Notices of the AMS is out. Two quite interesting articles, one of which is an interview with my colleague Joan Birman. She just recently officially retired, but, at the age of 79 is still very active in research … Continue reading →

Various things that I’ve run across recently that seem worth mentioning: The proceedings of the big yearly lattice gauge theory conference that was mentioned here, Lattice 2006, are now available here. The New York Times today in its Science Times … Continue reading →

There’s filming going on outside my office window today, right at the entrance to the Columbia Mathematics building. The film is Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, with a screenplay based on the David Foster Wallace book of the same name. … Continue reading →

You know things are getting strange when Esquire magazine starts running an article on the current state of particle theory. As you might expect, their take on this is rather odd. It centers around Nima Arkani-Hamed and begins with: For … Continue reading →

For some insight into the difficulties associated with being an untenured professor and trying to get an NSF grant in astronomy, see this post (and comments) by Rob Knop. For those innocent of the ways of academia, there’s a post … Continue reading →

Starting tomorrow there’s a workshop in London entitled M-theory in the City, in some sense celebrating the 11th birthday of M-theory. There will be a reception on Thursday evening, and the organizers of the workshop are noting that: Recently there … Continue reading →

Yesterday at the KITP in Santa Barbara, George Johnson gave a second talk and led a discussion on the subject of the “String Wars”. The rather remarkable first session was discussed here, here and here. This time people were much … Continue reading →

This week in Honolulu there’s a major particle physics conference going on, a joint meeting of the Division of Particles and Fields of the APS, and the Japanese Physical Society, called the Joint Meeting of Pacific Region Particle Physics Communities. … Continue reading →

From the “First Superstring Revolution” on, there have always been skeptics, even though they often were not very vocal. Perhaps the most well-known piece of such criticism was Paul Ginsparg and Sheldon Glashow’s Desperately Seeking Superstrings, which appeared in the … Continue reading →