As an antidote to the overwhelmingly depressing news of the world, I highly recommend reading the new article in the New York Times about this mathematical result.
There have been some articles about this earlier in places like Scientific American that emphasized the role of Joan Birman, who is still active at 99. I’ve been hearing from Joan regularly over the past few years about this project, and she always described it to me as largely the work of a talented young woman, Vasudha Bharathram. The New York Times story does a great job of explaining the story of this remarkable collaboration.
It is so nice to read an inspiring story in the newspaper instead of the usual procession of bad news. May we all continue to do good work well into old age. I don’t know Joan Birman, but I did know her husband Joe. Joe was on the faculty at CCNY, and worked in theoretical condensed matter physics. If you gave a colloquium at CCNY in the old days, you would be taken out for dinner afterwards by Joe and the three members of the National Academy of Sciences at CCNY, Mel Lax, Myriam Sarachik, and Herman Cummins. Sadly now all gone.
Indeed this is a happy thing. I hope it adds to the happiness to point out that, as far as I know, the first major progress on the Burau representation, that it is not faithful for n at least 9, was made by another Columbia grad, John Moody.
Serre, who is still doing maths, is celebrating his 100th birthday next week:
https://serre100.sciencesconf.org
It’s surprising to me that no biography of his has appeared to this day, when quite a few of Grothendieck have been published since he passed away, the latest being the roman by Pierre Lochak which came out last month.