Not Even Wrong

The announcement yesterday by OpenAI of a solution to the Millennium Prize Navier-Stokes problem has been causing a great deal of discussion among mathematicians.

Ever since a new Columbia president (Jennifer Mnookin) was appointed by the trustees back in January, many have been wondering if she would do anything to try and change Columbia’s reputation as “Vichy on the Hudson”.

As an antidote to the overwhelmingly depressing news of the world, I highly recommend reading the new article in the New York Times about this mathematical result.

The Economist today reports that New theories and experiments should shine light on string theory.

I’ve been talking to people and seeing a lot of discussion about the effects of AI agents on math research, but haven’t found much serious discussion of what is happening in hep-th research.

Kevin Hartnett posted the following Friday: My profile of @Jacob_Tsimerman, published the morning he won the Fields Medal, and hours before he announced he’s going to @OpenAI, reads like a requiem for a field.

Some things that might be of interest: The ICM is starting next week in Philadelphia.

A few months ago I decided to try and sort out the two dimensional spacetime case of the Wick rotation issues that have been bothering me for years now.

I’ve been working recently on trying to understand exactly how Wick rotation works in two-dimensional conformal field theory.

The first surprise of this afternoon was finally finding an informed and sensible discussion of the implications of AI agents for hep-th research, in the form of a twitter thread by stringking42069.