{"id":15770,"date":"2026-07-15T16:51:23","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T20:51:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=15770"},"modified":"2026-07-15T16:51:23","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T20:51:23","slug":"various-and-sundry-45","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=15770","title":{"rendered":"Various and Sundry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some things that might be of interest:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The ICM is starting next week in Philadelphia.  One traditional aspect of the ICM is the announcement of the Fields Medal winners.  This year there won&#8217;t be much surprise, since evidently someone found the names of the winners hidden in the website code (see <a href=\"https:\/\/mp.weixin.qq.com\/s\/DPsMKToa_sbi_Nx3X1Q04Q\">here<\/a>, English language news story <a href=\"https:\/\/panews.io\/articles\/019f5e7a-144b-728f-847e-2bb145b077fd\">here<\/a>). It&#8217;s Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman, and Hong Wang.  At least all science journalists who want to write about this now know the names, no controversies about who has embargoed information as in some past years.<\/li>\n<li>Strings 2026 was held last week in Beijing.  Looking through the talks (see <a href=\"https:\/\/strings2026.simis.cn\/schedule\">here<\/a>, videos <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLNrPK59t3SDg\">here<\/a>), I see nothing nothing that looks like a significant new idea or any evidence this isn&#8217;t a dead field.  I watched the public talk by David Gross, which was just bizarre.  Much the same talk Gross has been giving for thirty years about string theory unification, with no indication there&#8217;s any problem with the idea.  For detailed discussion of a similar talk 22 years ago, see <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2\">here<\/a>.  The main difference with that talk is that Gross removed all the slides about how SUSY was about to be found and would vindicate string theory. Gross argues against the &#8220;landscape&#8221;, saying that he thinks there will be some new insight explaining how all the constants of nature emerge from understanding the big bang, but this seems to be backed by nothing except wishful thinking.\n<p>Gross started off the talk by complaining that he had had to work hard for the few days before his talk, since he had found that his slides were so old that the file formats now had compatibility problems with current software.  I&#8217;m completely baffled by how anyone involved in this could think that going to the public with this sort of thing is a good idea.<\/p>\n<p>Also on the Strings 2026 topic, <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/stringking42069\/status\/2077369173500457213\">Stringking42069 is back<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Every so often I think it&#8217;s worthwhile to point to something about the &#8220;interpretation&#8221; of quantum mechanics that reflects my best understanding of the subject, so see <a href=\"https:\/\/deivondrago.substack.com\/p\/zureka-a-way-forward-to-solving-the\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Quanta magazine a while back had a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quantamagazine.org\/two-researchers-are-rebuilding-mathematics-from-the-ground-up-20260520\/\">good article<\/a> about the deep new mathematics being develop by Peter Scholze, Dustin Clausen and others. Clausen has a <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2605.11950\">paper<\/a> out on the Weil-Moore Anima he was <a href=\"https:\/\/indico.math.cnrs.fr\/event\/15893\/\">lecturing about at the IHES<\/a> earlier in the year.<\/li>\n<li>\nFinally, something inspirational:  my Columbia colleague Joan Birman is still active at 99 years old, and has an <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2607.05283\">important new result on the Burau representation<\/a>. This is the result of a project that began when a high school student, Vasudha Bharathram, came to Birman for help in learning more math and finding a problem to work on.  Bharathram will be a beginning Ph.D student at Princeton in fall.  The third member of the collaboration is Tara Brendle, a student of Birman&#8217;s.  This collaboration must break some sort of record in math research for the age range of the collaborators.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some things that might be of interest: The ICM is starting next week in Philadelphia. One traditional aspect of the ICM is the announcement of the Fields Medal winners. This year there won&#8217;t be much surprise, since evidently someone found &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=15770\">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_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[21,20,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quantum-mechanics","category-strings-2xxx","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\/15770","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=15770"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15772,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15770\/revisions\/15772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}