Maximize summer holiday

Teachers often complain about the lag in learning when students come back from summer vacation. There really doesn't need to be a delay as learning during the summer in a fun and engaging way. Especially so with mathematics.

The Math Playground is interactive and offers practice in fractions, decimals, percent, angles, early algebra, trig, multiplication and much more. If children just spent 15 or so minutes 4 or 5 times per week, the results will surprise you and will most definitely keep happy teachers. Although worksheets fine for practice, they are not a lot of fun and holidays are taking a break and some fun! ?

Mathematics and physics, in the summer 2011

This week in Philadelphia the String-Math 2011 Conference is underway, scheduled as the first of a series, with String-Math 2012 next summer in Bonn. Slides of the talks are listed here. There was also supposed to video, but the saved video seems to be a kind of UPenn login required, and I haven't been able to get the streaming video to work. Public talk by Cumrun Vafa crosses the classic message that strings have come to the rescue of physics, unifying QM and gravity, and which:

Flexible geometry of strings seems to explain all known interactions (at least in principle)

The techinical talks relate to a lot of ground, much of it having little to with string theory. Michael Douglas's talk surveys that related to find non-Perturbative formulations of quantum field theory hold that one could hope to have something to say about it exactly, but it contains many more questions than answers. I am most curious about David Ben-Zvi talk tomorrow, so hope that slides or video of that will be available.

The circle of ideas on gauge theory, geometric Langlands, TQFTs and representation theory gets even more attention than the mathematics of string theory this summer. In a few weeks will start with a two-part program on Luminy and then Cargese on double affine Hecke Algebras, the Langlands program, affine varieties of the flag, Conformal Field Theory, Super Yang-Mills theory. I do not know who the author is, but some person or group has written for the occasion a wonderful summary of the current activity in these and related areas of mathematics, see here. Next month, will be hosting a program KITP on non securities and dualities in QFT and Integrable systems that relate to some of the same topics will have.

In some other non-related news, if you understand French, you can listen to an interesting series of interviews with Pierre Cartier here. Finally, it was recently announced that $ 1 million this year is to share my colleague Richard Hamilton Shaw Prize for Mathematics with Demetrios Christodoulou. Richard Congratulations!