Yearly Archives: 2004

For many years now the SPIRES database at SLAC has been used to produce a list of the most frequently cited papers during each year. Since 1997 Michael Peskin has been doing this, while at the same time writing up … Continue reading →

The hundreds of expository articles about supersymmetry written over the last twenty years or more tend to begin by giving one of two arguments to motivate the idea of supersymmetry in particle physics. The first of these goes something like … Continue reading →

Slate this morning has an article by Jim Holt about an interview with Andrei Linde. In the interview, Linde speculates that universes like ours could be created in a lab, that maybe we live in such a universe, and that … Continue reading →

The last two talks at the Davis conference were quite interesting. Alexandre Givental gave one entitled “Twisted Loop Groups and Gromov-Witten Theory”, which went by way too fast. He has an interpretation of the generating functional for Gromov-Witten invariants that … Continue reading →

I’m in Nothern California this week, and have been attending some of the talks at the conference at UC Davis celebrating Albert Schwarz’s 70th birthday. The landscape at Davis is exceedingly flat, but this morning Lenny Susskind gave a remarkable … Continue reading →

Quantum mechanics and representation theory are very closely linked subjects since the Hilbert space of a quantum system with symmetry group G carries a unitary representation of G. To the extent that one has a way of quantizing a classical … Continue reading →

For quite a few years now, when I ask my colleague Herve Jacquet about what is going on in his field, he tells me something like: “Maybe someone will soon be able to prove the Fundamental Lemma”. This is a … Continue reading →

Alvaro de Rujula has posted on the arXiv under the title “Fifty years of Yang-Mills Theories: a phenomenological point of view” some of his recollections from the mid-seventies. These bring back my own memories of taking a course on particle … Continue reading →