Most new preprints in mathematics and physics these days are posted on the arXiv, but every so often I run into interesting new things worth reading that haven’t appeared there for one reason or another. Here are some recent examples:
Some lecture notes on Lie algebras by Shlomo Sternberg. Lots of topics covered I haven’t seen anywhere else, especially the material on the relation to Clifford algebras and the Kostant version of the Dirac operator.
Lecture notes by Constantin Teleman about his recent work on topological field theories and the Gromov-Witten theory of BG, the classifying space of a group. These are notes from talks given at Gregynog, Goettingen, and Miami. I confess that, like a lot of Teleman’s work, I have trouble figuring out exactly what he is up to, but it looks quite interesting. I wish he and Dan Freed and Mike Hopkins would get around to finishing their paper on “K-theory, Loop Groups, and Dirac Families” that Teleman has been advertising as “coming soon” for quite a while…
David Vogan has an interesting draft of a review of A. A. Kirillov’s book on the orbit method in representation theory. This is the most fully developed version of what is sometimes known as “geometric quantization”. Vogan also has some notes from his lectures this past year on “Unitary representations and complex analysis” which include material on the Borel-Weil theorem and its generalizations.
Nikita Nekrasov has some Lectures on Nonperturbative Aspects of Supersymmetric Gauge Theories and a written version of his 2004 Hermann Weyl Prize lecture.
Eckhard Meinrenken has a a nice expository article on the de Rham model for equivariant cohomology.
If someone learns the theta functions, their expansions, the forces between D8-branes etc., then he or she is a person familiar with string theory, and if he or she writes a paper about it, then he or she is working on string theory.
He or she may have a different approach to all these issues than others and may be more or less successful, but it is still string theory.
I am not like the kind of people who would like to eliminate (and often they DO eliminate) every piece of data that is inconvenient to them. And moreover I think that John Ellis is an interesting person with inspiring ideas, and I have absolutely no reason to try to verbally eliminate him from some group.
Wow, those Sternberg notes are excellent, thanks for that. Sternberg reads like a novel!
-drl
Here is what Peter was referring to Lubos about the Penquins
I thinks John’s post today directs attention to a certain amount of responsibilty?
For some good fun look up Ellis and Nanopoulos’s work on noncritical louiville string theory applied to the physics of the brain (the kind in your head).
Of course, I’d be surprised if they haven’t already found a way to connect Brane physics to brain physics also, the potential for cute irreverent paper titles being too much to resist.
Why Lubos wants to brag about this guy being a string theorist escapes me.
Yes indeed, they came up* with quite a Rube Goldberg contraption just to produce some effects attributable to spacetime foam. To say that they produced a model of spacetime foam is a stretch, to say the least. John Wheeler would be appalled.
In my opinion this kind of thing shows string/D-brane theorizing in the worst possible light.
(* Footnote 1 of this paper [gr-qc/0501060] cites the paper in which the model was initially presented.)
Well, the comment that Alexander and Ellis were not working on string theory was a bit of a joke, I wasn’t under the impression that they weren’t going to work on string theory any more.
I took a look at the Ellis paper, it is pretty amazing. The guy is clearly smoking a lot more powerful weed than back when he was seeing penguins in his Feynman diagrams.
John Ellis, whom you say is not currently working on string theory, has a new paper tonight about D8-branes and D0-branes:
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0501060
Nice links. There are still quite a few mathematicians who don’t routinely post their work on the ArXiv.