Various and Sundry

Posted on June 21, 2010 by woit
  • Last week’s symposium in Paris on Symmetry, Duality and Cinema now has talks available on-line. These include a very nice survey talk by Edward Frenkel, including some comments on his recent work with Langlands and Ngo that involves an analog of the trace formula in the geometric case. The symposium also included a showing of Frenkel’s film Rites d’amour et de maths, and the Huffington Post has an article about the film here.
  • Some notes from this year’s Talbot workshop on Twisted K-theory and Loop Groups have started to appear here.
  • For the last three weeks or so, the LHC has not been taking data, but instead working on commissioning the beam at higher intensity. This process should end soon, and the plan is to have physics runs this summer with up to 24 bunches/beam, getting an integrated luminosity of around 5 pb-1.
  • For an excellent article on the science job market in the US, see The Real Science Gap. The author quotes from this posting about 2009 particle theory hiring. Numbers for 2010 so far look similar.
  • The authors of the preprint that led to the “Five Higgs” world-wide hype-fest (see previous posting) have put out a revised version of their preprint. The first version gave as major motivation corroborating SM-violating data in another channel from earlier experiments, but this has gone away in recent CDF data. The new version removes most of the discussion of this, leaving one paragraph that seems odd to me, since it refers to the recent CDF data as “strengthening the case for physics beyond the SM”, although that data only disagrees with the SM at the .8 sigma level.
  • In Denmark it seems that they take their quantization of moduli spaces very seriously, with the Center for the Topology and Quantization of Moduli Spaces at Aarhus now joined by a new Center for Quantum Geometry of Moduli Spaces.
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    5 Responses to Various and Sundry

    1. Researcher says:
      June 21, 2010 at 6:46 pm

      Just a minor quibble: the letter p in The Real Science Gap is not linked.

    3. nbutsomebody says:
      June 22, 2010 at 3:57 pm

      Peter,

      I had an impression that job market in Mathematics is better than that of HEP. Partially because less number of people graduating. Please correct me if I am wrong.

    4. Peter Woit says:
      June 22, 2010 at 4:15 pm

      nbutsomebody,

      I don’t have any good numbers, but the job market seems to be much better in math than in HEP theory. The ratio of permanent jobs at research universities to people getting Ph.Ds at the top universities is much higher in math. In very rough numbers I’d guess that typical top US universities are each producing about 5 HEP theory Ph.Ds and 10 pure math Ph.Ds, who will end up competing for about 10 permanent HEP theory positions and an order of magnitude more permanent math research positions.

    5. Andy says:
      June 24, 2010 at 12:28 pm

      CQGM in Arhus is a continuation of CTQM, with the same director but under a different name.

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