Category Archives: Uncategorized

Harvard has announced that the Chinese firm Evergrande Group will be supporting various activities at Harvard, including a new Center for Mathematical Sciences and Applications, with S.-T. Yau as director. No details of what the center will do other than … Continue reading →

Two of the prominent string theorists working on ideas about holography and cosmology featured in Amanda Gefter’s new book are Tom Banks and Willy Fischler, who have a new paper out on the subject, entitled Holographic Space-time and Newton’s Law. … Continue reading →

Back in September, I wrote here about the news that Snowden’s revelations that confirmed suspicions that back in 2005-6 NSA mathematicians had compromised an NIST standard for elliptic-curve cryptography. The new standard was promoted as an improvement using sophisticated mathematical … Continue reading →

At the Hollywood-style awards ceremony last night for $3 million string theory and biomedical research prizes, it was announced that Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg will now start funding something similar in mathematics, called the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. According … Continue reading →

Last March an Oscar-style ceremony hosted by Morgan Freeman was held in Geneva (see here) to award the 2013 \$3 million Milner Prize to Princeton string theorist Alexander Polyakov. Tomorrow an even more lavish ceremony designed to turn “Oscars of … Continue reading →

This week the Simons Center is hosting a workshop on “The Geometry and Physics of Scattering Amplitudes”, talks are available here. Last week they (and the YITP) held a one-day symposium on Trees, loops and precision QCD, based around the … Continue reading →

The Guardian has an interesting piece about Peter Higgs, evidently their reporter talked to him on his way to the Nobel Prize ceremonies this week in Stockholm. Higgs will be speaking tomorrow (Sunday), and I’m curious to hear what he … Continue reading →

The last posting here was about an unusually collaborative effort among mathematicians, whereas this one is about the opposite, an unusually contentious situation surrounding important recent mathematical progress. What’s at issue is the proof of what has become known as … Continue reading →

There’s a new paper out on the arXiv last night, Small gaps between primes, by James Maynard, which brings the bound on the size of gaps between primes down to 600. This uses some new methods, beating out the Polymath8 … Continue reading →

Philip Anderson’s 90th birthday is coming up next month, and Princeton will host a workshop commemorating the event. Witten and Wilczek will give talks on the Anderson-Higgs mechanism, for which Anderson recently was not awarded a Nobel Prize (for the … Continue reading →