Thursday, January 27, 2011

Talk by Michael Atiyah on February one

On Tuesday February First, at eleven in Salle 5 of College de France, Sir Michael Atiyah will deliver a talk entitled "A Geometor explores the Universe". His abstract is the following:
"In the past decades theoretical physicists have been using ever more sophisticated mathematics to model the universe and its fundamental forces. Quantum Theory and Geometry are the two main ingredients but there are different schools of thought on how to fuse them together.
Einstein, with his success in General Relativity, argued for the primacy of Geometry and Dirac said we should be guided by beauty.  I belong to this camp and am tentatively exploring some new ideas."