theHigherGeometerApr 8

Hilbert, by Constance Reid.

A great book, showing David Hilbert's passage from a bold young and ambitious mathematician to an old man surrounded by the ruin of the mathematics department in Göttingen in the 1930s. This helped me place a lot of names of contemporaries, and I can appreciate Minkowski's truncated career much better, I had no idea how big a deal he was in this whole circle, nor that he died early. The author treats the mathematics very well even though she's not trained in it, and from a modern standpoint it helps me connects back from post-1930s work to the previous generation's revolutionary developments.

Electronic version: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0739-9

#Read2026

Show threadJohn Carlos BaezApr 8

@highergeometer - I may have read this once; I should read it again!

Minkowski was more than Einstein's teacher - the guy who realized time is imaginary - but I don't know his whole institutional role.

Show threadTony VladusichApr 8

@johncarlosbaez @highergeometer

I’ve been reading Gravitation by MTW. They seemed very unimpressed with Minkowski’s ict formulation. They even devote a small section to its “banishment”. 🤣

Show threadDavid Quintero
@TonyVladusich @johncarlosbaez @highergeometer yet using time as imaginary was a key ingredient for the no boundaries proposal by Hawking and Hartle about the origin of the universe. You know, ideas obey Nietzsche's eternal return.
Apr 8 at 7:57amWeb
Show threadtheHigherGeometerApr 8

@davidsuculum I think it's ok as a technical crutch, but actually doing the Wick rotation using imaginary time is nontrivial. Witness @peterwoit slow burn trying to come to grips with how this is supposed to work on a serious level of modern math physics, even without fancy proposals for universe origins.

@TonyVladusich @johncarlosbaez

Show threadJohn Carlos BaezApr 8

@highergeometer - Woit is trying to come to grips with how the Osterwalder-Schrader theorem doesn't cover spinor fields.

@davidsuculum @peterwoit @TonyVladusich