If a post-truth field of science is going to keep going, it needs to convince funders and the public that progress is being made, so there’s a continual need for people uninterested in truth and ...

The seminar will meet in-person, on Fridays 10:30 am to noon in Room 520.

The square peg problem was posed by Otto Toeplitz in 1911. It asks whether every Jordan curve in the plane contains the vertices of a square, and it is still open to this day. I will survey the ...

November 18th, 2024. University of Michigan. Group, Lie, and Number Theory seminar, 60 minutes : p-adic L-functions for P-ordinary Hida families on unitary groups. November 14th, 2024. University of ...

Curt Jaimungal has a piece out, an interview with Lenny Susskind, with the title The Crisis in String Theory is Worse Than You Think…. Some of what Susskind has to say is the same as in his recent ...

There’s no reason for nature to be pretty (5:00) Working on a theory of everything is a mistake because we don’t understand quantum mechanics (8:00). These are just wrong: nature is both pretty and ...

I grew up in the 1960s and 70s, at a time when fundamental physics was making huge dramatic progress and Western democracies were changing in equally dramatic ways, mostly for the better. It truly did ...

There’s a new book out this week, a biography of Roger Penrose by Patchen Barss, with the title The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the cost of genius. Penrose is one of the greatest figures in ...