{"id":2004,"date":"2009-05-21T12:23:16","date_gmt":"2009-05-21T17:23:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2004"},"modified":"2009-06-02T16:34:23","modified_gmt":"2009-06-02T21:34:23","slug":"various-and-sundry-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2004","title":{"rendered":"Various and Sundry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>HEPAP is meeting in Washington today, talks starting to become available <a href=\"http:\/\/www.er.doe.gov\/hep\/agendas\/HEPAPAgendaMay2009.shtml\">here<\/a>.  Things are very different now than in past years, with huge budget increases for all areas of HEP at the NSF and DOE.<\/p>\n<p>FQXI has awarded quite a few mini-grants, the list is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fqxi.org\/grants\/mini\/winners\">here<\/a>.  They also have a new essay contest, on the topic <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fqxi.org\/community\/essay\">What is possible and impossible in physics?<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Some worthwhile expository mathematics pieces:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jmilne.org\/math\/xnotes\/MOT.pdf\">Motives&#8212;Grothendieck&#8217;s Dream<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/math.stanford.edu\/~rabinoff\/misc\/witt.pdf\">The Theory of Witt Vectors<\/a><\/p>\n<p>At least one mathematician is a viscount and has a <a href=\"http:\/\/quomodocumque.wordpress.com\/2009\/04\/29\/the-viscount-delignes-coat-of-arms\/\">coat of arms<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Witten has a new paper on the arxiv entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0905.2720\">Geometric Langlands From Six Dimensions<\/a>, an expository account of a rather special 6d superconformal theory and how its existence implies SL(2,Z) symmetry of N=4 SYM, and thus duality in geometric Langlands theory.  He remarks that there isn&#8217;t a widely used name for this theory, calling it the &#8220;six-dimensional (0,2) model of type G&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>This week there&#8217;s a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.northwestern.edu\/~pgoerss\/tftemphasis\/\">workshop on Topological Field Theories<\/a> going on at Northwestern, with David Ben-Zvi lecturing on <em>Topological Field Theory, Loop Spaces and Representation Theory<\/em>.  I hope he&#8217;ll soon follow his standard practice of putting notes up on his web-site.<\/p>\n<p>Tomorrow I&#8217;ll head up to Cambridge for the weekend, to visit my brother and his family and to attend the <a href=\"http:\/\/math.mit.edu\/conferences\/singerconference\/\">Perspectives in Mathematics and Physics conference<\/a> being held in honor of Is Singer&#8217;s 85th birthday.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  Notes from the Northwestern workshop are available <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.uchicago.edu\/~ejenkins\/nwtft.html\">here<\/a> (from Evan Jenkins) and <a href=\"http:\/\/math.ucr.edu\/~alex\/\">here<\/a> (from Alex Hoffnung).<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  David Ben-Zvi has posted notes from his talk and some others at the Northwestern workshop <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.utexas.edu\/users\/benzvi\/GRASP\/lectures\/NWTFT.html\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>HEPAP is meeting in Washington today, talks starting to become available here. Things are very different now than in past years, with huge budget increases for all areas of HEP at the NSF and DOE. FQXI has awarded quite a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2004\">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-2004","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\/2004","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=2004"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2010,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004\/revisions\/2010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}