Biographies

Dense plots and deep thoughts.

Abraham Pais, "Subtle Is the Lord."
Abraham Pais, "Niels Bohr's Times."
Helge S. Kragh, "Dirac: A Scientific Biography."
Graham Farmelo, "The Strangest Man."
David C. Cassidy, "Beyond Uncertainty."
Walter J. Moore, "Schrodinger: Life and Thought."
Charles P. Enz, "No Time to Be Brief."
Nancy Thorndike Greenspan, "The End of the Certain World."
David N. Schwartz, "The Last Man Who Knew Everything."
Silvan S. Schweber, "QED and the Men Who Made It."
Jagdish Mehra, Kimball A. Milton, "Climbing the Mountain."
Lawrence M. Krauss, "Quantum Man."
David Kaiser, "Drawing Theories Apart."
Laurie M. Brown, Helmut Rechenberg, "The Origin of the Concept of Nuclear Forces."
George Johnson, "Strange Beauty."
Lillian Hoddeson, et al. (Eds.) "The Rise of the Standard Model."
Robert P. Crease and Charles C. Mann, "The Second Creation."
Frank Close, "The Infinity Puzzle."
Gerard 't Hooft, "In Search of the Ultimate Building Blocks."
Andrew Pickering, "Constructing Quarks."
Graham Farmelo (Ed.), "It Must Be Beautiful."
Jacome Armas, "Conversations on Quantum Gravity."
Michael Harris, "Mathematics without Apologies."
S.-T. Yau (Ed.), "The Founders of Index Theory."
Leila Schneps (Ed.), "Alexandre Grothendieck: A Mathematical Portrait."
Julia Mueller (Ed.) "The Genesis of the Langlands Program."
Goro Shimura, "The Map of My Life." _
Leo Corry, "Modern Algebra and the Rise of Mathematical Structures."
Terry Gannon, "Moonshine beyond the Monster: The Bridge Connecting Algebra, Modular Forms and Physics."

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Physics

Quantum theory is a representation theory, in a way similar to representation learning, where vectors and matrices represent states and actions (Lorentz transformations, creation and annihilation of particles).


Copenhagen interpretation is not really an interpretation. It is a specification and clarification of a set of axioms or postulates for a mathematical framework. The key is that classical reality does not exist (even counterfactually) without observer measurement. Observer is intentionally left undefined (similar to point in Euclidean system). Wave function is observer dependent.
game engine with rendered display | decoherence | consistent histories | deformation quantization

Jakob Schwichtenberg, "No-Nonsense Quantum Field Theory." _ (best entry point) | Wilson renormalization
Mark Srednicki, "Quantum Field Theory." _ (systematic)
A. Zee, "Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell." _ (charming)
Jared Kaplan, "Lectures on AdS/CFT from the Bottom Up." _
A. Zee, "Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell." _
Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne, and John A. Wheeler, "Gravitation." _
Mikio Nakahara, "Geometry, Topology and Physics." _
Roger Penrose, "The Road to Reality." _

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Math

Gentle expositions of central themes and objects in modern math, such as L-functions, group representations, modular forms, and motives. We need Jakob Schwichtenberg version of non-nonsense math of Grothendieck and Langlands, to separate key ideas from technical details, to maintain logic but discard rigor.

Langlands: exposition | slides | L-functions | trace formula | mirror symmetry | geometric Langlands
Moonshine: exposition | string theory | pariah moonshine | slides
Grothendieck: scheme | cohomology | Lefschetz | simplify| Weil | motive
Ravi Vakil, "The Rising Sea: Foundations of Algebraic Geometry." _
Daniel Dugger, "Navigating the motivic world." _
Galois: 1500 words

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