Some links of mathematical interest that I’ve recently run across:
- The life and work of Alexander Grothendieck is one of the great stories of modern mathematics. Winfried Scharlau’s first volume of a biography of Grothendieck, covering the years up to 1948 is now available in English, see here. The third volume, covering Grothendieck’s life after 1970 is only available in German, see here. Leila Schneps is writing a second volume, covering his life and mathematics during the height of his career, from 1948-1970, with chapters appearing as they are written on this page. She is now up to 1952.
The same page contains links to various wonderful articles about Grothendieck’s mathematics, many by mathematicians who interacted with Grothendieck during his period of greatest mathematical activity.
- Cédric Villani joins other Fields Medalists with blogs, see here. Villani has just published in France a memoir called Théorème Vivant, a mix of autobiography and description of a collaboration on a mathematics problem. More about the book here, here and here, with a video here.
- Many of the talks given at this summer’s String-Math 2012 conference are now available as slides or video, see here.
Grothendick lives in the south of France with a daughter who cares for him. At least that was the case about 5 years ago.
I found this interesting link, Alain Connes goes blogging:
http://noncommutativegeometry.blogspot.de/ – A DRESS FOR THE BEGGAR ?
His latest paper is pretty exciting, I find.
Maybe off topic, or already treated elsewhere, but could someone explain a bit this idea that coupling the Higgs with a new ? or neutrino related ? (this is not clear to me) scalar field, then some instability due to the low mass of the Higgs are cured.
This is the point of this Chamseddine-Connes paper: such an interaction term appeared in the spectral action, but was neglected. It seems that taking it into account, then noncommutative geometry can now accommodate a 125GeV Higgs (whereas the previous prediction, back to 2010, was around 170 GeV).