Special Guests
Freeman J. Dyson,Professor Emeritus, School of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, United States
dyson@ias.edu
http://www.sns.ias.edu/~dyson/
Freeman Dyson is now retired, having been for most of his life Professor of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He was born in England and worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force in World War II. Professor Dyson graduated from Cambridge University (1945) with a B.S. in Mathematics, went on to Cornell University as a graduate student (1947), and worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman. His most useful contribution to science was the unification of the three versions of quantum electrodynamics invented by Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga. Professor Dyson has written a number of books about science for the general public. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2000, Professor Dyson was awarded the Templeton Prize.
Peter Woit, Department of Mathematics, Columbia University,
New York, United States
woit@math.columbia.edu
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/
Peter Woit is a mathematical physicist at Columbia University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Particle Theory from Princeton University (1985). This was followed by postdoctoral work in theoretical physics at State University of New York at Stony Brook and mathematics at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley. Professor Woit spent four years as an Assistant Professor at Columbia University and now holds a permanent position as Lecturer in the Mathematics Department, where he runs the computer system, teaches classes, and continues his research activities, focusing on topics that relate representation theory and quantum field theory. Professor Woit is critical of the domination of particle theory research in recent years by string theory and is the author of the recent book Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics. His weblog on string theory and other topics in mathematics and physics is also entitled Not Even Wrong after the category into which speculative theories were dismissed by the discoverer of the exclusion principle, Wolfgang Pauli.
