Trying to keep track of everything happening in the Langlands program area of mathematics is somewhat of a losing battle, as new ideas and results keep appearing faster than anyone could be expected to follow. Here are various items: Dennis Gaitsgory was here at Columbia yesterday (at Yale the day before). I don’t think either lecture was recorded....

I heard this morning that Richard Hamilton passed away yesterday. He was a renowned figure in geometric analysis, and a faculty member here at Columbia since 1998. In terms of mortality, the last year or two at the Columbia math department have been grim ones, as we’ve lost five senior faculty at relatively young ages: Igor Krichever at age 72, Henry...

Quanta magazine has just put out an impressive package of material under the title The Unraveling of Space-Time. Much of it is promoting the “Spacetime is doomed” point of view that influential theorists have been pushing for decades now. A few quick comments about the articles: String theory is barely even mentioned. There is one article giving...

Today’s Washington Post has an opinion piece from Brian Greene, running under the demonstrably false title Decades later, string theory continues its march toward Einstein’s dream. In the piece, the argument of string theory critics is given as: Critics argue that the situation is untenable, noting, “If you can’t test a theory, it’s not scientific.”...

A few weeks ago I recorded a podcast with Robinson Erhardt, which has now appeared as String Theory and the Crisis in Physics. We mainly talk about the current situation of string theory in physics and the history of how things have gotten to this point, topics familiar to readers of this blog. Some other items: A Frequently Asked Question from...

I recently did another podcast with Curt Jaimungal, on the topic of unification, which is now available here. As part of this I prepared some slides, which are available here. The main goal of the slides is to explain the failure of the general paradigm of unification that we have now lived with for 50 years, which involves adding a large number of...