{"id":10053,"date":"2018-02-09T11:33:43","date_gmt":"2018-02-09T16:33:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10053"},"modified":"2018-02-28T13:54:58","modified_gmt":"2018-02-28T18:54:58","slug":"various-and-sundry-27","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10053","title":{"rendered":"Various and Sundry"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>I recently spent some time looking at old postings on this blog, partly because of writing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=9968\">this blog entry<\/a>, partly because Gil Kalai got me a copy of his book <a href=\"http:\/\/www.worldscientific.com\/worldscibooks\/10.1142\/10092\">Gina Says<\/a>.  For a moment I thought this would be a good time to write something about the &#8220;String Wars&#8221;, but then decided that project should wait for another time.  I did go quickly through old postings (there are 1660 of them&#8230;) and pick out a small subset that might be more worth reading for anyone with time on their hands.  A list is available by selecting the category <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?cat=26\">Favorite Old Posts<\/a>. <\/li>\n<li>Another category of blog posts that includes many that I spent more time than usual writing is that of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?cat=13\">Book Reviews<\/a>, of which there are 93 here (about ten of these were written for publication elsewhere).  Among the forthcoming books I&#8217;m hoping to write about are Sabine Hossenfelder&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hachettebookgroup.com\/titles\/sabine-hossenfelder\/lost-in-math\/9780465094264\/\">Lost in Math<\/a>, and the fifth volume of Raoul Bott&#8217;s Collected Works (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.target.com\/p\/raoul-bott-collected-papers-vol-5-hardcover\/-\/A-52099074\">listed at Target<\/a> under &#8220;test prep and study guides&#8221;).  Some other forthcoming books are Sean Carroll&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/seanmcarroll\/status\/960182575271587840\">Something Deeply Hidden<\/a>, and a new book by Brian Greene that I know nothing about other than <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/bgreene\/status\/958877162588770304\">this<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>A debate various places on Twitter about science journalism and accuracy included <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/chrisdc77\/status\/960304692449435648\">this from neuroscientist<\/a> Chris Chambers, who explains that when he looked into this he discovered what I&#8217;ve often seen in physics reporting: the source of hype is more often scientists and their press releases than journalists.<br \/>\nhttps:\/\/twitter.com\/chrisdc77\/status\/960304692449435648<\/li>\n<li>The <a href=\"https:\/\/ncatlab.org\/nlab\/show\/HomePage\">nLab project<\/a> has been joined by the even more exciting <a href=\"https:\/\/cemulate.github.io\/the-mlab\/\">mLab<\/a> project (some discussion <a href=\"https:\/\/golem.ph.utexas.edu\/category\/2018\/02\/mlab.html\">here<\/a>).<\/li>\n<li>This semester MSRI is running a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.msri.org\/programs\/295\">program on enumerative geometry<\/a>, with two workshops so far, materials <a href=\"http:\/\/www.msri.org\/workshops\/814\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.msri.org\/workshops\/815\">here<\/a>.  A lot of this subject has been influenced by ideas from physics, in particular from topological quantum field theories.  While my Columbia colleague Andrei Okounkov has been on leave this year, he&#8217;s written two excellent surveys of some recent work, see <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1801.09818\">here<\/a> (for the ICM) and <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1802.00779\">here<\/a>. For older surveys from him, see <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1701.00713\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1512.07363\">here<\/a>. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Update:<\/strong> I hear of yet another book in progress:  Lee Smolin on realist approaches to quantum foundations, tentative title &#8220;Beyond the Quantum&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update:<\/strong> Today (February 12) the Harvard Physics department is hosting a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.physics.harvard.edu\/events\/schwinger2018\">celebration of the centennial of Julian Schwinger<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p><strong>Update:<\/strong>  One of the prize possessions of my youth was a copy of Abramowitz and Stegun, a huge Dover paperback version of their reference tome <em>Handbook of Mathematical Functions<\/em>.  Physics Today has a <a href=\"http:\/\/physicstoday.scitation.org\/doi\/10.1063\/PT.3.3846\">long new article<\/a> about the twenty-first century version of this, the<a href=\"https:\/\/dlmf.nist.gov\/\"> Digital Library of Mathematical Functions<\/a>, now a project run by the NIST.<br \/>\n<strong><br \/>\nUpdate<\/strong>: This week there&#8217;s a <a href=\"https:\/\/indico.cern.ch\/event\/630393\/overview\">workshop on &#8220;Naturalness&#8221;<\/a> going on in Aachen.  Results from last year&#8217;s LHC run should start to appear soon, see <a href=\"https:\/\/indico.in2p3.fr\/event\/16579\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently spent some time looking at old postings on this blog, partly because of writing this blog entry, partly because Gil Kalai got me a copy of his book Gina Says. For a moment I thought this would be &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10053\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10053"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10074,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10053\/revisions\/10074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}