Category Archives: Uncategorized

Posting has been light recently, partly since I’ve been working on writing up notes for my course (more about that soon), but largely because there hasn’t been a lot of news to write about in the math-physics world. The LHC … Continue reading →

An important recent development in geometry has been the announcement of two claimed proofs of a long-standing conjecture about the existence of Kähler-Einstein metrics. Simon Donaldson is talking about this at MIT this week (see here and here), and the … Continue reading →

Resonaances has an excellent posting about the latest WMAP9 CMB measurements, and the value Neff for the number of implied light degrees of freedom. When the WMAP numbers were released late last year, they quoted Neff=3.89+/-.67, 3.26+/-.35, 2.83+/-.38 for the … Continue reading →

Twenty years ago this past week, John Baez posted the first of his “This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics” to the sci.physics newsgroups, inaugurating internet blogging about Mathematical Physics, many years before anyone even knew what a blog was. For … Continue reading →

The University of Birmingham has put out a press release today about new research by their computer scientists, on the topic of the spread of gossip about the Higgs via Twitter. This is all based on an arXiv paper, The … Continue reading →

Back from vacation today, so regular blogging likely to resume. Will start with something quick, a link to material that was posted today. The Edge web-site annual question feature is out today, with this year’s question What *Should* We Be … Continue reading →

Back when I was a student I remember learning that there were two possible sign conventions to use for the Minkowski space metric: the “East coast” one, mostly + signs, favored by relativists and Steven Weinberg, and the “West coast” … Continue reading →

This week there’s a conference in Oxford I’d have loved to have been at. Slides from some of the talks are already posted here. The conference is in honor of Graeme Segal’s 70th birthday. Happy Birthday Graeme! Physics Today has … Continue reading →

Classes are over for the semester, and I’ve put together the lecture notes for my undergraduate “Quantum Mechanics for Mathematicians” course, which are available here. The idea for the course was to try and explain the basics of quantum mechanics, … Continue reading →

For the latest SUSY enthusiast take on the implications of what the LHC has been (not) seeing, your best bet might be yesterday’s talk at the KITP by Nima Arkani-Hamed on Naturalness. An hour and 40 minutes, no slides, nothing … Continue reading →