Category Archives: Uncategorized

Now for some comic relief: A new issue of the Notices of the AMS is out. It contains an entertaining article entitled Foolproof: A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor with many examples of mathematical humor. Physicists also put in an … Continue reading →

There’s an interview with Andy Strominger in the Calcutta newspaper The Telegraph. Strominger was presumably in India for the string theory conference there this past week. The thing I found interesting about the interview was how skeptical the interviewer was, … Continue reading →

I was wondering why there were lots and lots of hits on this weblog today coming from Google searches for “first evidence for string theory”. It looks like the answer is this lead article from the latest New Scientist magazine. … Continue reading →

Tom Banks has a new preprint out, entitled Landskepticism: or Why Effective Potentials Don’t Count String Models. In it he argues against the idea that one can use effective potentials to study the supposed “Landscape” of different vacuum states of … Continue reading →

The winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics gave their Nobel lectures in Stockholm on Wednesday. The lectures of David Gross and Frank Wilczek are available on-line, for some reason that of David Politzer isn’t, at least not yet. … Continue reading →

This morning’s New York Times has a long and prominently placed article about the 20th anniversary of the “First Superstring Revolution”. The Times has a long history of producing overhyped uncritical articles about string theory, for a classic example, see … Continue reading →

A recent issue of Science magazine has an article about the “Strings and the Real World” workshop at Aspen this past summer, entitled String Theory Gets Real — Sort Of. A more accurate title for the article might be “String … Continue reading →

The second talk I heard yesterday at the Institute was by Chris Woodward from Rutgers. What he was talking about was a conjectural formula whose origins go back to a truly amazing paper by Witten from 1992 entitled Two Dimensional … Continue reading →

I was down in Princeton at the Institute yesterday and heard two interesting talks. The first was the beginning of a series of four lectures by Paul Baum about the Baum-Connes conjecture, the second was by Chris Woodward about “equivariant … Continue reading →

An excellent review article about the state of the proof of the Poincare conjecture by my colleague John Morgan has recently appeared. For more background on this, see an earlier posting. Morgan is a topologist, and his article contains an … Continue reading →