Sir Michael Atiyah: hard at work at 86
Transitivity The blog today is a result of transitivity: A implies B, and B implies C, so A implies C. (A) I am at the Banff International Research Station (BIRS) in Banff for a workshop on random geometric graphs. (B) The director of BIRS is Nassif Ghoussoub, who I recently interviewed. (C) Nassif Ghoussoub recently posted on…
Math art: Nuit Blanche intersects Coxeter
Geometry is the study of shape. There’s been a renaissance in geometry over the last hundred years, with modern applications ranging from the large-scale structure of space-time, to the modelling of social networks like Facebook, to the computer graphics in video games and movies. Donald Coxeter (1907-2003) was one of the greatest geometers in history. Coxeter is up…
Interview with a mathematician: Izabella Laba
Izabella Laba is a leading mathematician working at the University of British Columbia. Her research spans several fields such as harmonic analysis, geometric measure theory, mathematical physics, and the relatively new (but fast-breaking) area of additive combinatorics. She is highly awarded, having won the prestigious Coxeter-James and Krieger-Nelson Prizes of the Canadian Mathematical Society. In 2012, she became a fellow…
The geometry of social networks
A key insight of general relativity is the view of the universe as a four-dimensional geometric space. Gravitation and other forces within physics are explained as properties of the geometry. Analogously, string theory includes many dimensions, as many as ten or more, in an effort to explain all the forces of the universe. Given the geometry…