With the kids shipped off to NSA summer camp, now is the time for mathematicians and physicists to head off to their own summer camp experiences. Some of these have websites where the rest of us can participate a bit virtually. These include:
- Out at Stony Brook, in mathematical physics there’s the Simons Center Workshop going on now. This features lectures at the nearby Smith Point beach.
- Down in Princeton, the summer PiTP program for this year has just ended, with the topic New Insights Into Quantum Matter. In recent years many HEP theorists have given up on applying duality arguments to string theory unification and have gotten interested in condensed matter physics. Links on this schedule will take you to lectures that include three by Witten on Fermions and Topological Phases.
- Utah has been the center of the algebraic geometry world for the past few weeks, with the AMS Summer Institute in Algebraic Geometry held in Salt Lake City ending today. This is one in a series of big events held every ten years and as usual was preceded by a bootcamp for graduate students. Also as usual, the NSA is helping out with the funding.
Overlapping with this, some algebraic geometers were at camp up in the mountains nearby, at the Zermatt Resort, for the PCMI Summer Session, this year the topic was Geometry of moduli spaces and representation theory.
- Later this month, SLAC will host the 43rd SLAC Summer Institute, with topic this year The Universe of Neutrinos.
- For Spanish-speaking mathematicians, around the same time the place to be will be Cusco for AGRA 2015. Michael Harris has notes for his lectures and has started blogging in the appropriate language.
What happens at academic workshops anyway? Are they more for graduate students or do professors learn a few tricks as well? Or are they really just another hazily defined part of the workshop/colloquim/seminar/symposium/conference spectrum?
RandomPaddy,
Typically these things have some mix of graduate students, postdocs and senior people, as well as some mix of non-professional activities to keep them entertained. A few of them have separate components aimed at graduate students, or even undergrads (PCMI). One reason for linking to them is that there are a lot of good expository lectures, and some of the materials from them are available online.