Monthly Archives: December 2004

Shiing-Shen Chern 1911-2004

Posted on December 5, 2004 by woit

Shiing-Shen Chern, one of the great geometers of the twentieth century, died last Friday at Nankai University. He was 93 years old. An article about his life is posted on the web-site of MSRI, the mathematics institute in Berkeley of … Continue reading →

Posted in Obituaries | 26 Comments

String Theory Gets Real – Not

Posted on December 3, 2004 by woit

A recent issue of Science magazine has an article about the “Strings and the Real World” workshop at Aspen this past summer, entitled String Theory Gets Real — Sort Of. A more accurate title for the article might be “String … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Witten Localization

Posted on December 1, 2004 by woit

The second talk I heard yesterday at the Institute was by Chris Woodward from Rutgers. What he was talking about was a conjectural formula whose origins go back to a truly amazing paper by Witten from 1992 entitled Two Dimensional … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Paul Baum on Baum-Connes

Posted on December 1, 2004 by woit

I was down in Princeton at the Institute yesterday and heard two interesting talks. The first was the beginning of a series of four lectures by Paul Baum about the Baum-Connes conjecture, the second was by Chris Woodward about “equivariant … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment