The interview also contains quite a few amusing stories. Update: Also of note is this interview with Alain Connes (PDF), mentioned, again, over at Not Even Wrong: The bit about overselling rings a bell, doesn’t it? avoid working in areas which are too trendy whereas physicists behave a lot more like “bosons” which coalesce in large packs and are often “overselling” their doings, an attitude which mathematicians despise. The first observation is that each mathematician is a special case, and in general mathematicians tend to behave like “fermions” i.e. I was asked to write some advice for young mathematicians. And there is also a brief essay, Advice to the beginner, where, besides guidelines to young mathematicians, Connes gives his particular view of the physics community: A very interesting and enjoyable reading i’ve found there is Connes’ highly original View of Mathematics (PDF), which makes for a good introduction to NCG.

He’s also making available (in his downloads page) most of his recent articles and lecture notes, which make for an impressive list. Not an easy reading, by any account, but surely an interesting one. Not Even Wrong is a haunting journey into the borderlands of neurology - a meditation on what 'normal' is, and how human genius comes to us in strange and wondrous forms.I just noticed (hat tip Not even wrong) that Alain Connes has made available his book on non-commutative geometry, one of the third roads to quantum gravity. It is a story that reaches from a lonely clearing in the Black Forest into the London palace of King George I, from Defoe and Swift to the discovery of evolution from the modern dawn of the computer revolution to, in the end, the author's own household.

Examining forgotten geniuses and obscure medical archives, Collins's travels take him from an English churchyard to the Seattle labs of Microsoft, and from a Wisconsin prison cell block to the streets of Vienna. In Not Even Wrong, Paul Collins melds a memoir of his son's autism with a journey into this realm of permanent outsiders. He lives in a world of his own: an autistic world.

A casual conversation-or any social interaction that the rest of us take for granted-will, for Morgan, always be a cryptogram that must be painstakingly decoded. 'Collins elucidates, with great compassion, what it means to be 'normal' and what it means to be human.' - Los Angeles Times When Paul Collins's son Morgan was two years old, he could read, spell, and perform multiplication tables in his head.but not answer to his own name.

Not even wrong book