Category Archives: Uncategorized

A Counterexample to the Hodge Conjecture?

A paper appeared last night on the arXiv by K.H. Kim and F.W. Roush entitled Counterexample to the Hodge Conjecture. The authors claim to construct an example using K3 surfaces for which the Hodge conjecture is false. If they’re right … Continue reading

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Topology Board Resigns

One of the most prestigious journals in mathematics is called Topology. It is based at Oxford, its first issue was in 1962 and it has published many of the most important papers in the the field of topology. Since 1994 … Continue reading

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Yet More Links

A pretty random collection of interesting things I’ve noticed recently: The Mathematical Institute at Oxford has a newsletter, and from the latest issue I learned that Quillen is retiring and that they’re planning construction of a new building. There are … Continue reading

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Nobel Prize Winning Orgiasts

DealBreaker, which is described as “an online business tabloid and Wall Street gossip blog”, has a story about supposed Jeffrey Epstein parties “in which Nobel prize winners and various wealthy folks were all surrounded by young, ‘nude eastern european girls, … Continue reading

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Susskind on KQED

Someone wrote in to tell me that KQED this morning had Leonard Susskind on to discuss string theory and his book The Cosmic Landscape. Most of the program consisted of him promoting his usual line about the string theory anthropic … Continue reading

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Templeton Funding for Physics Research

The Templeton-funded FQXI organization has announced today the awarding of 30 grants totalling more than $2 million dollars for foundational research in physics. On the one hand I’ve always been dubious about this organization since it is funded by a … Continue reading

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Conferences, etc.

Lattice 2006, the big yearly conference on lattice gauge theory, is going on the week in Tucson. The program is here, and both plenary and parallel session talks are being posted. Georg von Hippel is blogging from the conference, his … Continue reading

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Latest on Poincare

A new 473-page paper by Gang Tian and my colleague John Morgan that gives a complete proof of the Poincare conjecture based upon the argument outlined by Grigori Perelman (which carries out the program of my other Columbia colleague Richard … Continue reading

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Various and Sundry

Since it’s summer, lots of conferences going on: The Institute in Princeton has its usual summer program designed to train graduate students and postdocs in string theory. The schedule and lecture notes are here. On the opposite coast, with an … Continue reading

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The String Ideology

If you want to get an understanding of the ideology that many string theorists subscribe to, you should check out Lubos Motl’s latest posting. Besides the usual dismissal of non-believers as idiots, incompetents and crackpots (an attitude that unfortunately seems … Continue reading

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