Yearly Archives: 2005

Mathematician Dave Morrison is giving a colloquium talk tomorrow at the KITP with the provocative title How Much Mathematics Does A Theoretical Physicist Need To Know? It should soon be available for viewing on the KITP web-site, and I’m looking … Continue reading →

I just finished reading an interesting new book by astrophysicist Mario Livio. It’s called The Equation That Couldn’t Be Solved, and the subtitle is “How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry”. Livio’s topic is the idea of a symmetry … Continue reading →

I realize that this is a low form of entertainment, but reading Lubos Motl’s blog today has definitely livened up my birthday, which in recent years has been a rather sad occasion. It’s hard to say what is the funniest … Continue reading →

The October issue of the Notices of the AMS is now available on-line. It has an interesting historical article about Henri Poincare, and a short expository article called WHAT IS… a Pseudoholomorphic Curve by Simon Donaldson. Counting these pseudo-holomorphic curves … Continue reading →

The latest issue of Astronomy magazine has two articles hyping the landscape/multiverse/anthropic principle and cosmic superstrings. Many well-known theorists are quoted supporting the anthropic principle and the multiverse, including Joe Polchinski, Nima Arkani-Hamed, Martin Rees, Max Tegmark, Alexander Vilenkin, Alan … Continue reading →

During the last couple days, some interesting commentary on quantum gravity has appeared at a couple places on the web. One is at John Baez’s latest edition of his proto-blog This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics. John is mainly writing … Continue reading →

I recently got a copy of a very interesting new textbook entitled A First Course in Modular Forms by Fred Diamond and Jerry Shurman. Fred was a student of Andrew Wiles at Princeton, and came here to Columbia as a … Continue reading →

As discussed here, here, here, and here, the arXiv is now putting on each abstract page a link to trackbacks from weblogs which contain a link to the paper in question. This is an interesting mechanism for integrating the discussion … Continue reading →

There have been two quite interesting Oberwolfach workshops this summer with some relation to my favorite ideas about K-theory and quantum field theory. The most recent was a workshop on Gerbes, Twisted K-theory and Conformal Field Theory, with blogging from … Continue reading →