Monthly Archives: August 2005

John Horgan’s New York Times Op-Ed Piece

Posted on August 12, 2005 by woit

Today’s New York Times contains an Op-Ed piece by science writer John Horgan entitled In Defense of Common Sense. In it, Horgan takes an iconoclastic view of this year’s many celebrations of the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s great work of … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 25 Comments

KITP Weblog

Posted on August 11, 2005 by woit

The KITP program on Mathematical Structures in String Theory has a new weblog associated with it where Andrew Neitzke has been posting summaries of the talks given there. The idea of having such weblogs attached to programs like the one … Continue reading →

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Jean Dieudonne

Posted on August 11, 2005 by woit

Pierre Cartier has written a short biographical article about the remarkable French mathematician Jean Dieudonné. Cartier estimates that Dieudonné wrote about 80,000 pages of mathematics over the course of his career. He was a driving force behind Bourbaki, often taking … Continue reading →

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Geometric Langlands on the Beach

Posted on August 11, 2005 by woit

I’ve written a bit about the Geometric Langlands Program and its relation to physics here late last year, confessing to being confused about what it was supposed to have to do with N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills. Yesterday Witten gave a talk … Continue reading →

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Panel Discussion Video

Posted on August 8, 2005 by woit

Video of the panel discussion at Toronto is now available, so one can hear some of the context of the comments that were reported in the recent New York Times article. As reported, the audience voted 4 or 5 to … Continue reading →

Posted in Strings 2XXX, Uncategorized | 69 Comments

New Theoretical Physics Institute in Florence

Posted on August 8, 2005 by woit

A new institute devoted to theoretical particle physics has been organized, the Galileo Galilei Institute for Theoretical Physics, which will be located in Florence. The purpose of the institute is to organize advanced workshops, the first of which will take … Continue reading →

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Mathematics and Narrative

Posted on August 6, 2005 by woit

A group called Thales and Friends, based in Greece and sponsored by MSRI, has organized a recent conference about Mathematics and Narrative that took place last month on Mykonos. Their web-site has abstracts of the talks and some other interesting … Continue reading →

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Strings on the Beach

Posted on August 6, 2005 by woit

The KITP in Santa Barbara, a few steps from the beach, is running a semester long program on Mathematical Structures in String Theory that started this past week. Some of the talks are already on-line. On the other coast, as … Continue reading →

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Bogdanovs on Wikipedia

Posted on August 6, 2005 by woit

I’ve never really understood how Wikipedia works, especially how it protects itself from getting filled with nonsense. The entry about the Bogdanovs has evidently recently been the subject of repeated attempts by the Bogdanovs to modify it, one can follow … Continue reading →

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Strings for Dummies

Posted on August 6, 2005 by woit

Joe Lykken just finished giving a series of talks at the SLAC summer school, now entitled “String Theory for Physicists”. This was changed from the original title, “String Theory for Dummies” (still on the poster). Presumably somebody realized that the … Continue reading →

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