Back to Math and Physics

A few math and physics items:

• Masaki Kashiwara is the winner of the 2025 Abel Prize, see an announcement here, a New York Times article here and a Nature article here.

  Kashiwara has worked an a wide range of topics in representation theory and has been one of the main developers of the field sometimes known as algebraic analysis. Many of his papers are available through the list of publications at his website. For more about his work, see this 2018 article by Pierre Schapira.

  My own encounters with his work include reading his 1978 papers with Michele Vergne (see here and here), getting a lot out of this wonderful survey of the geometric approach to representation theory of real Lie groups, and periodic partially successful attempts to better understand “algebraic analysis” through a couple of his co-authored books on my shelves (Foundations of Algebraic Analysis and Sheaves on Manifolds). Schapira tells me he has been writing some newer lecture notes with Kashiwara, see his web-page here.

• There was a conference last week at Harvard to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of John Tate. The talks were intended to be not so technical and accessible to graduate students. Slides from many of the talks are now available on the conference webpage, and I hear that they were all recorded, with videos to be available at some point.
• Turning to physics, there’s an article about what’s happened to supersymmetry at Scientific American, and a survey from Copenhagen about attitudes of theorists towards some issues in fundamental physics. No numbers about how many physicists now take SUSY models seriously, other than that it’s clearly has been a monotone decreasing function of time for quite a while. On the “Which is the best candidate for a theory of quantum gravity?” question, string/M-theory is now at 21%, also likely a monotone decreasing function of time.
• Robinson Erhardt has a new podcast featuring Leonard Susskind. Susskind goes into more detail about his claims made here that, as currently understood, string/M-theory cannot be a theory of the real world. He remains hopeful that some new ideas inspired by string theory will come up that will provide such a theory, but acknowledges that right now, this is just a hope.
• Finally, if you haven’t gotten enough about me and my views so far, the First Principles website now has an interview (picture is from last week in Paris…).