Category Archives: Uncategorized

Recall that this past March results from BICEP2 were announced, claiming a greater than 5 sigma detection of a primordial B-mode signal in the CMB polarization. This result received a huge amount of world-wide attention (and see some commentary here). … Continue reading →

Daniel Quillen, one of the greatest mathematicians of the latter part of the twentieth century, passed away in 2011 after suffering from Alzheimer’s. For an appreciation of his work and an explanation of its significance, a good place to start … Continue reading →

The Defense Department has awarded a $7.5 million grant to Steve Awodey of CMU, Vladimir Voevodsky of the IAS and others to support research in Homotopy Type Theory and the foundations of mathematics. I had thought that getting DARPA 10 … Continue reading →

If you’re looking for something to do next Tuesday evening here in New York, an event called Raising the Bar has recruited 50 people to give talks at bars around the city. There are some quite interesting talks on the … Continue reading →

The May issue of Scientific American has a very good cover story by Joe Lykken and Maria Spiropulu, entitled Supersymmetry and the Crisis in Physics (the article is now behind their subscriber paywall, but for those with access to Nature, … Continue reading →

Just time at the moment for some quick links. I’ll start with some math news, since there hasn’t been much of that here recently: Matt Baker has the sad news here of the death of Berkeley mathematician Robert Coleman recently, … Continue reading →

Ten years ago I wrote here about the news that Witten had finally given up on string theory. Today I just heard a similar but even more dramatic rumor: next week’s episode of The Big Bang Theory features string theorist … Continue reading →

My spring break vacation is not quite over but, after 10 days of spectacularly beautiful weather, it’s now raining hard here today and I’ve got some time indoors to write something. First some quick links to things I’ve seen in … Continue reading →

I’m leaving for a spring break vacation in Northern Italy tomorrow afternoon, and will shut down comments while I’m away. Back in two weeks. Some events that will occur while I’m away that might be of interest: The 2014 Templeton … Continue reading →