{"id":8797,"date":"2016-10-04T20:03:15","date_gmt":"2016-10-05T00:03:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8797"},"modified":"2016-10-07T16:38:56","modified_gmt":"2016-10-07T20:38:56","slug":"back-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8797","title":{"rendered":"Back"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Now back from traveling, regular blogging will resume. Here are a few items:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I was going to write something yesterday, explaining that this year&#8217;s physics Nobel would surely go to the LIGO trio who have gotten every other major physics prize this year.  Luckily I was too lazy to do that yesterday, since this morning&#8217;s news is that it instead went to Haldane, Kosterlitz and Thouless, work going way back to the early 1970s.  When I was doing my thesis work trying to figure out how to find a lattice version of topological invariants of gauge fields, I started out looking at the case of the 2d XY model which they had studied, where the topology is much simpler.\n<p>Congratulations to them, probably next year for the LIGO guys&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>My colleague Daniel Litt has started up a really nice <a href=\"http:\/\/www.daniellitt.com\/blog\/\">blog<\/a>.\n<\/li>\n<li>Some sort of time warp back to the days of pre-LHC hype of the last decade seems to have occurred while I was in Germany, leading to lots of media stories like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.express.co.uk\/news\/science\/713680\/Black-holes-bridges-other-worlds-wormholes-space-time-theory-explained-nine-dimensions\">this one<\/a>.\n<\/li>\n<li>In Heidelberg among the people I met were Dirk Huylebrouck, who reminded me that there&#8217;s lots of great material in the <a href=\"http:\/\/link.springer.com\/journal\/283\">Mathematical Intelligencer<\/a>, including his &#8220;Mathematical Tourist&#8221; column, and Barry Cipra, one of the authors of the AMS&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ams.org\/samplings\/math-history\/happening-series\">What&#8217;s Happening<\/a> series.\n<\/li>\n<li>John Baez is involved with a new project, funded by DARPA, that he describes <a href=\"https:\/\/johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com\/2016\/10\/02\/complex-adaptive-system-design-part-1\/\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Last week there was a conference in Madrid devoted to the question <a href=\"https:\/\/workshops.ift.uam-csic.es\/susyaaw\/program\">Is SUSY Alive and Well?<\/a>.  Of the talks I looked at, the only one with a sensible answer to the question was that of <a href=\"https:\/\/workshops.ift.uam-csic.es\/files\/205\/Strumia.pdf\">Alessandro Strumia<\/a>.<br \/>\n<strong>Update<\/strong>:  A commenter points to this very interesting <a href=\"https:\/\/workshops.ift.uam-csic.es\/susyaaw\/Survey\">survey<\/a> of the participants.\n<\/li>\n<li>In case you haven&#8217;t heard what&#8217;s going on in Leicester, Tim Gowers explains <a href=\"https:\/\/gowers.wordpress.com\/2016\/09\/15\/in-case-you-havent-heard-whats-going-on-in-leicester\/\">here<\/a>.\n<\/li>\n<li>I was very sorry to hear of the passing last Saturday of Joseph Birman, a theorist at CCNY, and husband of my colleague Joan Birman.  Some information about one aspect of Joe&#8217;s work is <a href=\"http:\/\/concernedscientists.org\/2016\/10\/ccs-is-very-sad-to-announce-the-passing-of-one-of-its-most-devoted-members-vice-chair-joseph-birman\/\">here<\/a>, perhaps more about other aspects will appear soon.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Now back from traveling, regular blogging will resume. Here are a few items: I was going to write something yesterday, explaining that this year&#8217;s physics Nobel would surely go to the LIGO trio who have gotten every other major physics &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8797\">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-8797","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\/8797","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=8797"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8814,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8797\/revisions\/8814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}