News

Remembering Isadore Singer

It is with great sadness that we reflect on the loss of Professor Isadore Singer: Is Singer was a friend and colleague of many at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics. He played an important role in the creation of the Simons Center and was the founding co-chairman of its Board of Trustees.  His achievements … Read more

A New Collider in our Backyard

US Electron Ion Collider to be Built at Brookhaven National Laboratory  By Abhay Deshpande, Professor, Stony Brook University; Director, EIC Science, Brookhaven National Laboratory Recent news and excitement On January 9, 2020, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced the selection of Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) as the site of its future Electron Ion Collider … Read more

Mapping the Universe

By Marilena Loverde Assistant Professor of Physics C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics Stony Brook University

A Dialogue Between a Struggling Student and his Advisor, Eugenio Calabi

By Xiuxiong Chen, Professor of Mathematics, Stony Brook University   I met Professor Eugenio Calabi in the Fall of 1989, a couple of months after I arrived on the University of Pennsylvania campus. We hit it off quite nicely, as he was a zealous lecturer and loved to go to the blackboard, while I was … Read more

Splitting the Indivisible

By Charles L. KaneChristopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Physics University of Pennsylvania Matter can arrange itself in the most ingenious ways. In addition to the solid, liquid and gas phases that are familiar in classical physics, electronic phases of matter with both useful and exotic properties are made possible by quantum mechanics. In the … Read more

Pondering a Miracle

By Graham Farmelo Fellow, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, U.K.Adjunct Professor of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, MA Miracle of miracles—that’s how the great physicist Frank Yang described the discovery that some of the beautiful structures of modern mathematics precisely describe our universe’s underlying order. This link between the concrete world of physics and the abstractions … Read more

A Unity of Knowledge

Spenta R. Wadia is Founding Director and Infosys Homi Bhabha Chair Professor at the International Center for Theoretical Sciences of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bangalore, India. His main research interests are in elementary particle physics, string theory and quantum gravity. Here is an excerpt from an interview during Spenta’s visit to SCGP.

Spacetime and Quantum Mechanics

By Juan Maldacena Carl P. Feinberg Professor, School of Natural Sciences Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ Juan Maldacena is Carl P. Feinberg Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1996, Juan Maldacena became associate professor of physics at Harvard in 1997. In November of that … Read more

What is Geometry?

Geometry, from the ancient Greek geo (earth) and metron (measurement), is often considered a universal quality in human thinking. In fact, this idea of an innate ability to “know” geometry dates back to Plato. In the dialogue Meno, written about 380 BC by Plato, the philosopher Socrates draws out an accurate answer to a geometric … Read more