{"id":5995,"date":"2013-06-03T14:23:33","date_gmt":"2013-06-03T18:23:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=5995"},"modified":"2013-06-03T14:23:33","modified_gmt":"2013-06-03T18:23:33","slug":"simons-75th-birthday-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=5995","title":{"rendered":"Simons 75th Birthday Conference"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week the CUNY Graduate Center hosted a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.sunysb.edu\/events\/simonsmath\/\">conference<\/a> in honor of the 75th birthday of Jim Simons.  It was organized by Dennis Sullivan as a set of expository &#8220;mini-courses&#8221; on various topics related to Simons&#8217; mathematical work.  I was able to attend the morning talks, which were of a uniformly high quality, and focused on the Chern-Simons 3d QFT, as well as the &#8220;differential characters&#8221; of Cheeger and Simons.  Video of  most of the talks is available online <a href=\"http:\/\/videostreaming.gc.cuny.edu\/videos\/channel\/55\/\">here<\/a>.  In particular, Witten&#8217;s talk, which was a very simple physical introduction to use of the Abelian Chern-Simons term in condensed matter, is available <a href=\"http:\/\/videostreaming.gc.cuny.edu\/videos\/video\/792\">here<\/a> (followed by Deligne on Deligne-Beilinson cohomology).  Talks by Robbert Dijkgraaf on Chern-Simons-Witten theory are <a href=\"http:\/\/videostreaming.gc.cuny.edu\/videos\/video\/799\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/videostreaming.gc.cuny.edu\/videos\/video\/803\">here<\/a>. The second Dijkgraaf talk was followed  (go to 1:05) by some informal comments by Simons himself, explaining the history of how Chern-Simons came about.  Mike Hopkins gave two wonderful talks, the <a href=\"http:\/\/videostreaming.gc.cuny.edu\/videos\/video\/800\">first<\/a> about differential characters in general and about his <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1301.5959\">recent article with Dan Freed<\/a>, the <a href=\"http:\/\/videostreaming.gc.cuny.edu\/videos\/video\/810\">second<\/a> about his <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/math\/0211216\">work with Singer<\/a> that used generalized differential cohomology.<\/p>\n<p>The talks I missed were likely just as good, I&#8217;m starting to catch up on them on video now&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week the CUNY Graduate Center hosted a conference in honor of the 75th birthday of Jim Simons. It was organized by Dennis Sullivan as a set of expository &#8220;mini-courses&#8221; on various topics related to Simons&#8217; mathematical work. I was &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=5995\">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-5995","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\/5995","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=5995"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5998,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5995\/revisions\/5998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}