Yearly Archives: 2005

The great French mathematician André Weil spent the months of February-May 1940 in a prison in Rouen, as a result of what he referred to as “a disagreement with the French authorities on the subject of my military obligations”. Others … Continue reading →

The FY 2006 budget requests to Congress are out today. In the parts relevant to funding for mathematics and physics, the information about the NSF request is here, and information about the DOE request is here. One should really be … Continue reading →

Michael Douglas gave a colloquium at City College this afternoon, with the title “Are there testable predictions of string theory?” I went up there to the talk, figuring that I knew more or less what he would say, but he … Continue reading →

Jacques Distler has a new posting about multi-loop string amplitudes. It’s mainly devoted to the Berkovits superstring formalism, and explains in some detail the possible problems with this formalism that one might worry about. I’d alluded to some of these … Continue reading →

Slashdot today has something pointing to Larry Osterman’s weblog where he tells the story of my ex-roommate David Weise’s career, much of which has been spent at Microsoft. David is generally credited with almost single-handedly making Windows a viable product, … Continue reading →

John Ellis’s weblog has a new entry on Future Particle Accelerators which discusses prospects for a linear collider. The plan for an “International Linear Collider”, or ILC is now in its design phase, with work proceeding on a detailed design … Continue reading →

An expository article by the the algebraic geometer Yuri Manin always has something interesting in it, and his latest, entitled The notion of dimension in geometry and algebra is no exception. In this article Manin discusses various ideas related to … Continue reading →

Ken Lane has written a letter to the editor of the Boston University student newspaper to complain about its article about string theory and the BU physics department discussed in a previous posting. Lane is annoyed about not having been … Continue reading →

A couple weeks ago, three string theorists, (Nicolai, Peeters and Zamaklar) posted on the arXiv a critical assessment of loop quantum gravity. Today I received from Lee Smolin something he wrote responding to them, and I’m posting it here with … Continue reading →

Eric D’Hoker and D.H. Phong this past week finally posted two crucial papers with results from their work on two-loop superstring amplitudes. The first one shows gauge slice independence of the two-loop N-point function, the second shows that, for N … Continue reading →