Up from Silence, Reading what I barely understand, barely understood generously. Martin Krieger

I've not posted much here, since I have not been reading books per se. Lots of detective novels, mostly forgettable but pleasureable. But mostly reading stuff for my research projects. I am doing a revision of my Doing Mathematics, and so I have been trying to understand stuff from the last 15 years. Most of this is well beyond the edge of my understanding. But I see that Edward Frenkel (Berkeley, Mathematics) has many parallels to what concerns me, the famous Andre Weil letter to his sister Simone providing an account of the connection of geometry/analysis with arithmetic and function theory* being on his mind, as well as mine.

Frenkel is working, really working, within the Langlands Program. I just know lots about various practical solutions to the Ising model in two-dimensions--a very nice model of nearest neighbors influencing each other within a general environment characterized by a temperature that causes the individuals to ignore their neighbors' interactions with them---at low temperatures, the ignoring is much weaker and neighbors really do influence each other, dramatically.

My other reading is preparing for my course on defense policy. Much of the literature here is ideological and not meant to be balanced. (Even) The professors have their idees fixes, since in part they may have public roles in which they have a particular point of view where subtlety would  be taken as weakness.

What's funny for me about the math and physics I have been reading is how far it is from the way I was taught 40-50 years ago. Quantum field theory has become more complex to deal with what nature sends our way, or invent ways that nature might work (eg supersymmetry), while at the same time we have a very robust model, the standard model of nature, that we could not imagine when I finished graduate school in the late 60s. Better put, we could imagine how systematic and organized the story could be, although it is just like electromagnetism, where "just like" is of course is saying that we see in the current theory an echo of Maxwell's account.

MK

* Recall from high school that

geometry:  sin (x + pi)=sin x and that undulating curve that is the sine function
function theory: sin (2x)=2 (sin x) (cosine x) 
and number theory: that sin x = x + x^3/3! + x^5/5! and so forth, so that the sin function packages, so to speak, the factorials of the odd numbers.