{"id":7028,"date":"2014-07-08T19:32:25","date_gmt":"2014-07-08T23:32:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=7028"},"modified":"2014-07-08T22:55:53","modified_gmt":"2014-07-09T02:55:53","slug":"quick-links-20","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=7028","title":{"rendered":"Quick Links"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Jim Simons is profiled in the <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/articles\/a-50-million-gift-to-cold-spring-harbor-laboratory-140470566\">Wall Street Journal<\/a> yesterday, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/07\/08\/science\/a-billionaire-mathematicians-life-of-ferocious-curiosity.html\">New York Times<\/a> today.  The WSJ piece is partly about a recent $50 million donation to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cshl.edu\/research\/quantitative-biology\">Simons Center for Quantitative Biology<\/a> at Cold Spring Harbor, but it reports that Simons is moving away from &#8220;broad institutional support&#8221;, in favor of &#8220;collaborative, goal-driven science&#8221;.  Recently Simons has funded the <a href=\"http:\/\/ucsdnews.ucsd.edu\/pressrelease\/new_telescopes_to_give_uc_san_diego_researchers_glimpse_of_the_beginning_of\">Simons Array<\/a> of telescopes that will be looking at polarization in the CMB, and the NYT piece reports that he was talking to Stanford physicists working on experiments looking for the axion.  Simons is estimated to have a net worth of $12.5 billion, the Simons Foundation now has $2 billion.<\/li>\n<li>Quite a few years ago I started a trip to Paris by getting off the plane from New York and heading directly to attend talks at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bourbaki.ens.fr\/\">Seminaire Bourbaki<\/a>.  The main thing I remember now of that is an epic struggle to stay awake, since I hadn&#8217;t slept on the plane, and the room was rather overheated.  There&#8217;s now a much better way to enjoy talks from this historic program, which since its inception in has been the source of some of the great expositions of new mathematics.  Talks are on Youtube, links are on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bourbaki.ens.fr\/seminaires\/2014\/Prog_juin14.html\">latest program<\/a> (learned about this from <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/2014\/06\/26\/bourbaki-seminar-online\/\">Emmanuel Kowalski&#8217;s blog<\/a>).<\/li>\n<li>In other news from France, this year&#8217;s Baccalaureat exam features <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lemonde.fr\/mmpub\/edt\/doc\/20140617\/4439493_94e1_physique_chimie_bcg_s_specialite.pdf\">questions about the Higgs and the LHC<\/a>.  They start off with a quote from Carlo Rovelli about the Higgs discovery being &#8220;as important for intellectual history as Newton&#8217;s law of gravitation&#8221;.  Rovelli&#8217;s reaction: &#8220;I&#8217;ve never thought such a stupid thing.&#8221;  For more on the mini-controversy, see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.20minutes.fr\/insolite\/1404866-baccalaureat-2014-un-scientifique-dement-une-citation-qui-lui-est-attribuee-dans-un-sujet-d-examen\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>For more videos to watch, Oxford has an interview with Atiyah <a href=\"https:\/\/www.maths.ox.ac.uk\/node\/25692\">here<\/a>, Penrose <a href=\"http:\/\/www.maths.ox.ac.uk\/node\/25923\">here<\/a>.  Cambridge has a large collection of such video interviews, including <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sms.cam.ac.uk\/media\/1131073\">Peter Swinnerton-Dyer<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sms.cam.ac.uk\/media\/1114747\">John Coates<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sms.cam.ac.uk\/media\/1129468\">Martin Rees<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sms.cam.ac.uk\/media\/1128888\">John Polkinghorne<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>The AMS has been encouraging discussion in the mathematical community of the implications of the Snowden revelations about the activities of the NSA, supposedly the largest employer of mathematicians in the US.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ams.org\/notices\/201406\/rnoti-p623.pdf\">This month&#8217;s Notices<\/a> includes pieces from Keith Devlin and Andrew Odlyzko, introduced by Michael Harris and Allyn Jackson.  Further contributions to this discussion are encouraged.<\/li>\n<li>On the abc conjecture front, perhaps the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.kyushu-u.ac.jp\/seminars\/view\/1373\">planned lecture series<\/a> this September by Go Yamashita will give mathematician&#8217;s a fighting chance to understand Mochizuki&#8217;s claimed proof.  While the talks will be in Japanese, presumably Yamashita will be producing something written in English.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jim Simons is profiled in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, the New York Times today. The WSJ piece is partly about a recent $50 million donation to the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology at Cold Spring Harbor, but it reports &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=7028\">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_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7028","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\/7028","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=7028"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7030,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7028\/revisions\/7030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}