I was very pleased to hear yesterday that this year’s Abel Prize has been awarded to Michel Talagrand. For more about Talagrand and his mathematics, see the Abel site, Quanta, NYT, Nature and elsewhere. Also, see lots of reactions on Twitter.
Almost exactly ten years ago I got an email from someone whose name I didn’t recognize, expressing interest in the notes I had made available online which would turn into the book on quantum mechanics.
He was reading the notes and had some comments which he included, saying he thought they were trivial but maybe I would want to take a look.
Some of them were of the type “I don’t quite understand the argument on page X”.
Figuring that I’d help out an earnest reader with a weak background by explaining the argument a bit better, I took a look at the argument on page X.
After a while I realized that what I had written was nonsense, a very different argument was needed.
“I don’t quite understand” was his way of politely telling me “you have this completely wrong.”
I soon ran into Yannis Karatzas and asked him if he knew anything about this “Michel Talagrand”. He told me “of course! He’s amazing, almost got a Fields Medal”.
Over the next year or two I benefited tremendously from Michel continuing to read carefully through my notes and send me detailed comments.
He was very much responsible for improving a lot the quality and accuracy of what I was writing.
He had begun his own project of trying to understand quantum field theory by writing a book about it.
The result is available as What Is a Quantum Field Theory?, which is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in a precise and accurate account of much of the basics of the subject.
If you’ve seen Gerald Folland’s excellent Quantum Field Theory: A Tourist Guide for Mathematicians, you can think of Talagrand’s book as a much expanded version, giving the full story that Folland only sketched
#peterwoit #MichelTalagrand #FieldsMedal #NotEvenWrong
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13877
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