Category Archives: Uncategorized

This is something I wrote back in June, for context see the next posting. First of all, there’s the following, which is not strictly scientific, but very relevant to how one decides to evaluate progress in a subject. The Maldacena … Continue reading →

I noticed yesterday a website named Math Job Rumors that has been operating for a couple months. No idea what the story behind it is other than that it’s clearly a descendant of Economics Job Market Rumors, which had some … Continue reading →

Guangyu Xu, a student just finishing his Ph.D. at the Centre for Particle Physics at Durham University, recently sent me a public letter he wrote, explaining the story of his job search, in hopes that it might be useful to … Continue reading →

A couple weeks ago rumors were circulating that Yitang Zhang was claiming a proof of a longstanding open conjecture in number theory, the “no Landau-Siegel zeros” conjecture. Such a proof would be a very major new result. Zhang was a … Continue reading →

The arXiv today has a very comprehensive survey of a conventional point of view on where “Physical Mathematics” is in 2022 and where it is going, written by a group of six authors. “Physical Mathematics” is a term popularized by … Continue reading →

There’s a long interview with David E. Kaplan (not the same person as David B. Kaplan…) by David Zierler at the AIP Oral Histories site. The whole thing is quite interesting and I recommend reading it, but I do want … Continue reading →

A question that has always fascinated me about mathematics is that of how the field manages to stay healthy and not degenerate in the way I’ve seen theoretical physics do as it lost new input from experiment. On Twitter, Ash … Continue reading →

Heading to Oxford today, this evening I’ll give a talk there on Unified Theories of Physics. On Saturday I’ll try to find some way to get to the HTLGI Festival in London despite a national rail strike, where I’ll give … Continue reading →

A random collection of things that may be of interest: September 17 and 18 I’ll be at the How the Light Gets In Festival in London, participating in discussions of the relation of math and physics, and theories of everything. … Continue reading →