Category Archives: Uncategorized

The winners of the 2006 Fields Medals are Terence Tao and Grigori Perelman (as widely predicted), also Andrei Okounkov, and Wendelin Werner. For some more information, see the press releases at the ICM site. Okounkov’s mathematical work has been in … Continue reading →

Lee Smolin’s forthcoming book “The Trouble With Physics” has a web-site. There’s a new group blog focusing on n-categories, The n-Category Cafe, which will be run by John Baez, David Corfield and Urs Schreiber. It looks like Urs will basically … Continue reading →

Science magazine this week has an article about the anthropic string theory landscape controversy, entitled A ‘Landscape” Too Far, by Tom Siegfried. The only theorist quoted as opposing anthropic landscape arguments as not science is David Gross, although experimentalist Burton … Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →