The picture is of Emmy Noether, a theoretical physicist/mathematician from the first half of the twentieth century. Despite coming up with one of the deepest theorems in physics, she is not well known, in particular, her contemporary Marie Curie is much better known. A large majority of the physicists who have revolutionised our understanding of the natural […]
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Over Christmas I try to do a bit of reading, of papers I may not have time to think about during term time. I am reading a couple (1,2) of papers by McKnight and coworkers in the biology journal Cell. In a nutshell, they have discovered, at least partially by accident it appears, that important […]
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Term has now ended, undergraduate teaching has finished for 2012, and most of the undergraduates have gone home. As always at the end of term, there is a certain amount of relief, it has been 11 weeks of hard work. But also a bit of sadness. Campus is a quieter, duller place without most of […]
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I have almost finished the biography of a scientific hero of mine, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes. One observation in the book has particularly struck me, and that is that de Gennes viewed his approach as more like that of the Impressionist artists, and less like the approach of the artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.
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This is the last week of semester before the Christmas break, so things are getting a little busy, and I could spend a day at Cambridge talking science with an old friend and his PhD student. The student has started from a paper I did almost ten years ago, and is extending the work. He […]
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I am reading a biography of Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, by Laurence Plévert. De Gennes won the Nobel prize in physics in 1991. I guess he is a scientific hero of mine. The Nobel prize was for his work on understanding polymers and liquid crystals. You are probably reading this screen with a liquid crystal display of […]
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