Category Archives: Uncategorized

A few links that may be of interest. Mathematics first: A seminar “Lectures Grothendieckiennes” on the mathematical ideas of Alexander Grothendieck is taking place this year in Paris, and has just recently started up. My ex-Columbia colleague Jeff Achter is … Continue reading →

Since returning from a vacation partly spent isolated from the internet, I’ve been catching up and noticed that some of the most prominent sources of funding for math and physics research have been making the news: The New York Times … Continue reading →

A few short items: My graduate school roommate Nathan Myhrvold has a new book coming out this month, a five-volume series about the science of bread, based on several years of research into the subject at his laboratory near Seattle. … Continue reading →

The 50th anniversary of electroweak unification is coming up in a couple days, since Weinberg’s A Model of Leptons paper was submitted to PRL on October 17, 1967. For many years this was the most heavily cited HEP paper of … Continue reading →

If you’re a fan of The Big Bang Theory, perhaps you’ve seen the latest episode, The Retraction Reaction. If not, you might be interested in the following transcript (taken from here). The show has always done a good job of … Continue reading →

At this point, Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss of LIGO have (deservedly) won just about every scientific prize out there, for the first observation of gravitational waves. I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t believe they’ll be getting the Physics … Continue reading →

I don’t know if I ever mentioned this, but quite a while ago I replaced the “latexrender” TeX plugin being used here by a mathjax one. As I find time, I’m now going back and editing old posts to get … Continue reading →

Earlier this week Zohar Komargodski (who is now at the Simons Center) visited Columbia, and gave a wonderful talk on recent work he has been involved in that provides some new insight into a very old question about QCD. Simplifying … Continue reading →

Quanta magazine today has a column by Robbert Dijkgraaf that comes with the abstract: Reductionism breaks the world into elementary building blocks. Emergence finds the simple laws that arise out of complexity. These two complementary ways of viewing the universe … Continue reading →

This semester I’m teaching the first semester of Modern Geometry, our year-long course on differential geometry aimed at our first-year Ph.D. students. A syllabus and some other information about the course is available here. In the spring semester Simon Brendle … Continue reading →