Professional Update

News from here is that as of July 1 I’ll be on a one-semester sabbatical, then will officially retire at the end of the year. This won’t affect that much what I’m actually doing with my time. I’m not moving out of New York and will continue to spend most of my time coming in to the math department to work, but will from now on not be regularly teaching and will mostly give up the administrative things I have been doing for the department having to do with the computer system. In the future I do expect to at some point teach some more courses, but probably not until spring 2027.

In September I’ll be 68, and have always intended to not keep my current position past the age of 70. The reasons for retiring at the end of the year include wanting to focus full-time for a while on research, not wanting to be committed to teaching a course here for now given the disturbing things that have happened (with more likely to come) and the university announcing a financial incentive program for those willing to retire by the end of the year. I’m quite happy with the way this is working out.

I’ll be on vacation in Canada July 3-19. The rest of the summer will be working on trying to write up the progress I’ve been making on the ideas I’ve been pursuing the past few years. The latest version of such a paper focuses not on the twistor stuff but on explaining exactly how “Wick rotation” does something quite unexpected in the case of spinors, opening up new possibilities for unified theories. As always, the problem with writing the paper is that as I write my perspective on the subject changes and I keep changing the conception of the paper. Hopefully this process will converge on a finished version of some kind soon.

During the next academic year I won’t be teaching, look forward to spending a fair amount of time traveling. If you’d like to hear more about the ideas I’ve been working on in person, let me know since I might be near your town sometime during the coming year.

Blogging will continue in some form or other. Much of my recent blogging has been driven by trying to understand what’s going on at Columbia. Unfortunately at this point I’m starting to feel that I understand this all too well, so will continue to report on what’s happening, but spend less time thinking about (and getting disturbed by) it. Will try to find news worth writing about on the math and physics fronts, something that is becoming especially hard to do in physics.

Update: Maybe I should emphasize that, while I’m “retiring” in the sense that Columbia will no longer be paying me a salary and I won’t be teaching a course every semester, I’ll still be spending my time in much the same way as in recent years. The main difference I’m hoping for is to concentrate more on making progress on the research program I’ve been pursuing, so very much not “retiring” from that, quite the opposite.