The Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook is having a workshop this week on Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Field Theory. I was hoping to find time to go out there and hear some of the talks, but the beginning of classes has kept me here today and tomorrow, and later in the week I need to make a short trip to Toronto. But luckily there are high-quality videos, and today Witten gave an interesting talk on What one can hope to prove about three-dimensional gauge theory. What struck me most though was how little we still know about even simple questions about 3 and 4 dimensional gauge theory. Witten expressed hope that studying these questions is something that will get re-invigorated and draw new attention. I hope he’s right. Also worth watching is Arthur Jaffe’s summary of the history and state of the art of constructive field theory.
Also in the category of talks that I’d love to hear, but they’re a bit too far afield to get to this week are Jacob Lurie’s Whittemore Lectures at Yale, dealing with the Siegel Mass Formula, Tamagawa numbers and Non-abelian duality. I fear they don’t have video, but if anyone knows of a source of information dealing with what Lurie talked about, I’d love to hear about it.
Peter,
Do you have a link/source/description/abstract for Lurie’s lectures?
I hope that video recording was not turned on only for Witten and Jaffe’s sake and that videos for Monday’s (and other day’s) talks will appear eventually.
David,
There are some abstracts for the talks on the Yale math dept. calendar listings at
http://math.yale.edu/mathematics-calendar
Dito, hopefully the talk of Planck medaillist Detlev Buchholz will be put online, too. Maybe some of the AQFT specialists have something new to say about the connection of quantized gauge theories and Haag-Kastler nets.
*I hope that video recording was not turned on only for Witten and Jaffe’s sake and that videos for Monday’s (and other day’s) talks will appear eventually.*
Igor,
The site says Monday’s talks were not recorded (because MLK holiday).
But all Tuesday’s are shown as recorded and the rest will eventually be available from the looks of it.
Marcus, thanks for pointing that out. Still, that’s an unfortunate, though clearly accidental, anti-AQFT bias.