Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

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 →

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 →

The International Congress of Mathematicians will be taking place in Madrid relatively soon, in late August. One tradition at this conference is the announcement of the Fields Medals, and I’m getting embarassed that I’m not hearing any authoritative rumors about … Continue reading →

A correspondent wrote in to tell me about a wonderful web-site, called People’s Archive.  Their idea is to do in-depth interviews at a peer-to-peer level with the great thinkers and creators of our time.  They’ve been doing this for a … Continue reading →

Taking off tomorrow for a long weekend, internet access may be spotty. Here are some things that may be of interest: HEPAP is meeting today and tomorrow, the presentations given at the meeting are available here.  JoAnne Hewett is there … Continue reading →

I hadn’t realized how many of the physics departments at the top universities in the US have instituted undergraduate string theory courses.  The only one I was aware of was MIT’s 8.251, String Theory for Undergraduates, taught by Barton Zwiebach, … Continue reading →

Alex Vilenkin has a new popular book out about cosmology, entitled Many Worlds In One. It’s mainly about the extremely speculative end of cosmology, and much of it is devoted to explaining the author’s ideas on eternal inflation, creating the … Continue reading →

The Cao-Zhu paper at the Asian Journal of Mathematics that is supposed to have a complete proof of the Poincare and geometrization conjectures is still not available, but the introduction to the paper has been posted there. If you’re not … Continue reading →