{"id":2431,"date":"2009-10-29T18:15:11","date_gmt":"2009-10-29T23:15:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2431"},"modified":"2009-10-29T18:15:11","modified_gmt":"2009-10-29T23:15:11","slug":"short-mathematical-items","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2431","title":{"rendered":"Short Mathematical Items"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
  • Riemann submitted his paper on the Riemann Hypothesis October 19, 1859, and it was read by Kummer at the meeting of the Berlin academy on November 3. AIM is organizing a celebration<\/a> of the 150th birthday of the Riemann Hypothesis, with a “Riemann Hypothesis Day” on November 18th. Talks will be given on that day at many institutions around the world, a list is here<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  • The Royal Society in Britain has announced<\/a> the appointment of six “Royal Society 2010 Anniversary Research Professors”. Two of them are mathematicians: Timothy Gowers, of Cambridge, and Andrew Wiles, who will be leaving Princeton to take up the position at Oxford. Wiles has this comment about his current research:
    \n

    Over the last several years my work has focused primarily on the Langlands Program a web of very influential conjectures linking number theory, algebraic geometry and the theory of automorphic forms. I am trying to develop arithmetic techniques that will, I hope, help to resolve some of the fundamental questions in this field. I am delighted to be appointed a Royal Society Research Professor in their anniversary year and I look forward to the opportunities this will give me to further my research.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n

  • I spent a couple days earlier this week up in New Haven, attending a conference<\/a> celebrating Gregg Zuckerman’s 60th birthday. Zuckerman’s specialty is representation theory, and he’s well-known in that subject for several ideas that have been important in the modern understanding of infinite dimensional representations of semi-simple Lie groups. He also has done quite a bit of work in mathematical physics, work which includes a classic paper (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 83 (1986), pp. 8442\u20138446) with his Yale collaborators Howard Garland and Igor Frenkel explaining some aspects of the BRST quantization of the string in terms of semi-infinite cohomology. As far as I know, he was the first person to study (in a 1986 paper “Action principles and global geometry”) the field theory with Chern-Simons action that Witten was to make famous two years later when he worked out its significance as a TQFT giving interesting 3-manifold and knot invariants. <\/li>\n
  • An hour or so ago I went out for a walk, stopped at the bookstore, and noticed that there’s a new book out about Grigori Perelman, entitled Perfect Rigor<\/a>. It looks worth reading, perhaps they’ll be a longer blog post about it sometime soon…<\/li>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Riemann submitted his paper on the Riemann Hypothesis October 19, 1859, and it was read by Kummer at the meeting of the Berlin academy on November 3. AIM is organizing a celebration of the 150th birthday of the Riemann Hypothesis, … Continue reading →<\/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-2431","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\/2431","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=2431"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2434,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2431\/revisions\/2434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}