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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The goal of this talk is to explain some recent (so-called “categorical”) perspectives on the Langlands program. I will gently lead up to these new developments, beginning with background and examples ...