John Baez

John Baez (August 2009)

John Carlos Baez (born June 12, 1961 in San Francisco ) is an American mathematical physicist and professor at the University of California , Riverside .

Life

Baez graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1982 and received his doctorate in 1986 from Irving Segal at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( Conformally invariant quantum fields ). He was a post-doctoral student at Yale University and has been teaching mathematics at the University of California at Riverside since 1989.

Among other things, John Baez works in the areas of loop quantum gravity (spin foam, spin networks) and category theory and the general application of algebraic structures in physics . The cobordism conjecture comes from him and James Dolan .

John Baez is best known for his presence on the Internet , in particular for his This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics column, which has been appearing at irregular intervals since 1993 , in which he writes on various topics in physics and mathematics , and which he writes in several Usenet newsgroups and on published on his homepage. He is also one of the founders of the group blog n-Theory-Café on higher category theory.

In 2010, worried about global changes such as climate change , he decided to turn to applications and is at the same time at the Center for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore . He started the scientific discussion forum Azimuth Project on the topic of global climate change .

For 2013, he and John Huerta (his PhD student) were awarded the Levi L. Conant Prize . He has been a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1999 .

Joan Baez is his cousin and her father, the physicist Albert Baez (1912–2007), is his uncle. John Baez is married to Lisa Raphals, a professor of Chinese and literature at UC Riverside.

Fonts

• Editor with J. Peter May Towards Higher Category Theories , Springer Verlag 2010
• as editor of Knots and Quantum Gravity , Oxford University Press 1994
• Editor with Javier P. Muniain Gauge fields, knots and gravity , World Scientific 1994
• with Irving Segal , Zhengfang Zhou Introduction to Algebraic and Constructive Quantum Field Theory , Princeton University Press 1992
• with John Huerta The Algebra of Grand Unified Theories , Bulletin AMS, Volume 47, 2010, pp. 483–552, Arxiv (for this they received the Levi L. Conant Prize)
• with Aaron Lauda The prehistory of n-categorical physics , in Deep beauty , Cambridge University Press 2011, Arxiv
• The Octonions , Bulletin AMS, Vol. 39, 2002, pp. 145-205, Arxiv
• with James Dolan From finite sets to Feynman diagrams , in Björn Engquist, Wilfried Schmid (editor) Mathematics Unlimited , Springer Verlag 2001, pp. 29–50, Arxiv
• with James Dolan Categorification , in Ezra Getzler, Mikhail Kapranov (Editor) Higher Category Theory , Contemporary Mathematics, Volume 230, 1998, American Mathematical Society, pp. 1–36, Arxiv
• An Introduction to Spin Foam Models of Quantum Gravity and BF Theory , Lecture Notes in Physics, Volume 543, 2000, pp. 25-94, Arxiv
• Spin Foam Models , Classical and Quantum Gravity, Volume 15, 1998, pp. 1827-1858, Arxiv
• Spin Network States in Gauge Theory , Advances in Mathematics, Volume 117, 1996, pp. 253-272, Arxiv

Web links

• John Baez 'homepage
• This Week's Finds

Individual evidence

1. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
2. ^ Azimuth Project
3. ↑ Fellows of the AAAS: John C. Baez. (No longer available online.) American Association for the Advancement of Science, archived from the original on February 3, 2018 ; accessed on February 2, 2018 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.