Author Archives: woit

Feynman Lectures on the Strong Interactions

Posted on June 15, 2020 by woit

Available at the arXiv this evening is something quite fascinating. Jim Cline has posted course notes from Feynman’s last course, given in 1987-88 on QCD. There are also some audio files of a few of the lectures available here. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

An Advertisement for Representation Theory

Posted on June 9, 2020 by woit

There’s a new article at Quanta today promoting representation theory, Kevin Hartnett’s The ‘Useless’ Perspective that Transformed Mathematics. Representation theory is a central, unifying theme in modern mathematics, one that deserves a lot more attention than it usually gets, with … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

The Week’s Anti-Hype

Posted on May 27, 2020 by woit

I never thought I would see this happen: a university PR department correcting media hype about its research. You might have noticed this comment here a week ago, about a flurry of media hype about neutrinos and parallel universes. A … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Oral Histories

Posted on May 24, 2020 by woit

I recently ran across a recent interview with Mary K. Gaillard, which encouraged me to look again at the AIP’s oral histories site. For a review of her autobiographical book, see here. She has the following comments on the current … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Final Fourier Analysis Notes

Posted on May 18, 2020 by woit

Our semester here at Columbia is finally over, and I’ve put the lecture notes on Fourier analysis that I wrote up in one document here. A previous blog posting explained the origin of the notes: they cover the second half … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 15 Comments

Some Philosophy of Science

Posted on May 5, 2020 by woit

Defenders of certain failed speculative theories like to accuse those who point to their failure of being “Popperazzi”, relying on mistaken and naive notions about predictions and falsifiability due to Karl Popper. That’s never been the actual argument for failure, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 18 Comments

Various and Sundry

Posted on April 30, 2020 by woit

If like most other people you’re stuck at home, and having trouble concentrating on the projects you thought the current situation would cause you to finally find the time to complete, one thing you could do is watch a lot … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments

Why the Szpiro Conjecture is Still a Conjecture

Posted on April 18, 2020 by woit

There has been a remarkable discussion going on for the past couple weeks in the comment section of this blog posting, which gives a very clear picture of the problems with Mochizuki’s claimed proof of the Szpiro conjecture. These problems … Continue reading →

Posted in abc Conjecture | 39 Comments

Lucien Szpiro 1941-2020

Posted on April 18, 2020 by woit

I’m very sorry to hear (via Michael Harris) of the death this morning in Paris of Lucien Szpiro, of heart failure. Szpiro was a faculty member here at Columbia for a few years, livening up the place at a time … Continue reading →

Posted in Obituaries | 5 Comments

Latest on abc

Posted on April 3, 2020 by woit

Davide Castelvecchi at Nature has the story this morning of a press conference held earlier today at Kyoto University to announce the publication by Publications of the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences (RIMS) of Mochizuki’s purported proof of the abc … Continue reading →

Posted in abc Conjecture | 136 Comments