Approaching 50 Years of String Theory

Brian Greene has a new video out today, of himself talking to Edward Witten, mainly about string theory. Pretty much the usual decades-old hype, with nothing even slightly different than what a sim…

The story of Erdős problem #126

Problem 1026 on the Erdős problem web site recently got solved through an interesting combination of existing literature, online collaboration, and AI tools. The purpose of this blog post is to try…

WAM 2026

Waves, Wave Packets, and Their InteractionsMay 17-22, 2026Uhlenbeck Lecture Course:Lecturer: Monica Visan, UCLATerng Lecture Course:Lecturer: Dominique Maldague, Cambridge University and UCLA

The Unknotting Number is Not Additive

On June 30, 2025, Mark Brittenham and Susan Hermiller uploaded a preprint to the arXiv called “Unknotting number is not additive under connected sum” (and an updated version on Septembe…

Terence Tao (@[email protected])

Some loosely organized thoughts on the current Zeitgeist. They were inspired by the response to my recent meta-project mentioned in my previous post https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115254145226514817, where within 24 hours I became aware of a large number of ongoing small-scale collaborative math projects with their own modest but active community (now listed at https://mathoverflow.net/questions/500720/list-of-crowdsourced-math-projects-actively-seeking-participants ); but they are from the perspective of a human rather than a mathematician. As a crude first approximation, one can think of human society as the interaction between entities at four different scales: 1. Individual humans 2. Small organized groups of humans (e.g., close or extended family; friends; local social or religious organizations; informal sports clubs; small businesses and non-profits; ad hoc collaborations on small projects; small online communities) 3. Large organized groups of humans (e.g., large companies; governments; global institutions; professional sports clubs; large political parties or movements; large social media sites) 4. Large complex systems (e.g., the global economy; the environment; the geopolitical climate; popular culture and "viral" topics; the collective state of science and technology). (1/5)

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