News
HodgesfestAt the Oxford Mathematical Institute this week, physicists and mathematicians have been celebrating the 65th birthday of Andrew Hodges, pioneer of twistor diagrams and biographer of Alan Turing. Graham attended the meeting, titled New geometric structures in scattering amplitudes, organised in collaboration with the Clay Mathematics Institute and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
Andrew Hodges
Remembering the Clement Attlee of nuclear scienceGraham will be speaking at an international gathering on 18 and 19 September to celebrate the life and legacy of Sir John Cockcroft.
Graham appeared onstage today with Taylor Downing, author of the fine Secret Warriors. In the audience was Peter Higgs, co-winner of last year’s Nobel Prize for physics. Over lunch with Graham beforehand, Peter said that he was now making progress with his aim ‘to retire from retirement’.
Graham’s biography of Dirac has now been published in Turkish.
The Daily Telegraph in the UK has selected Churchill’s Bomb as one of its books of the year.
Edited video of Graham in converation with Nima Arkani-Hamed about where fundamental physics might be heading in the next few decades.
Suarez Tweet goes viral
Graham Farmelo (@grahamfarmelo)
24/06/2014 18:55
Suarez ready for the next match: pic.twitter.com/BjXrZ5lXDC
CNN yesterday afternoon featured Graham’s Tweet about Louis Suarez’s preparations for his next World Cup match.
Meeting the king of the twistorGraham spent last Thursday in Oxford with the great mathematician Roger Penrose, 82, inventor of the mathematical object known as the twistor. In a wide-ranging conversation, Penrose talked about his early life, his development as a scientist and his thoughts on the latest developments in fundamental physics.
Roger Penrose, Oxford, May 2014
Art of ExplainingGraham was on stage in Berlin on Monday evening with Freeman Dyson, Canadian biographer Siobhan Roberts and Russian film-maker Ekaterina Eremenko to discuss ‘The Art of Explaining’. Chaired by the physicist Jochen Bruening, the panel talked about some of the ways of presenting science and mathematics to non-specialist audiences.
Panel at the Restaurant Alpenstueck after their discussion: (left to right) Jochen Bruening, Freeman Dyson, Ekaterina Eremenko, Siobhan Roberts and Graham.
The cleric who wanted Dirac kept out of Westminster AbbeyThe struggle to have Dirac commemorated in Westminster Abbey lasted several years, as Graham describes in The Strangest Man. According to the late physicist Dick Dalitz, who led the group that campaigned for the commemoration, the main obstacle was the Dean of Westminster, who objected that Dirac had been a ‘militant atheist’. …
Michael Mayne, Dean of Westminster Abbey (1986-1996)