John C. Baez

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John Carlos Baez (born 1961) is an American mathematical physicist at the University of California, Riverside. He is known for his work on spin foams in loop quantum gravity. More recently, his research has focused on applications of higher categories to physics.

Baez is known to science fans as the author of This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics, an irregular column on the web featuring mathematical exposition and criticism. Baez started This Week's Finds in 1993 for the Usenet community, and it now has a worldwide following. This Week's Finds anticipated the concept of a personal weblog.^{[citation needed]} Baez is also known on the World Wide Web as the author of the crackpot index.

Abbreviated mathematical genealogy of John Baez

Baez earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics at Princeton University in 1982. He earned his Ph.D. at MIT in 1986, under the direction of Irving Segal. Baez is one of many mathematicians who can trace their "mathematical genealogy" back to the famous Carl Friedrich Gauss.

Singer Joan Baez is his cousin, and her father, physicist Albert Baez, was his uncle.^[1]

[edit] References

• "John Carlos Baez". The Mathematics Genealogy Project. American Mathematical Society. http://www.genealogy.ams.org/id.php?id=25152. Retrieved on August 13 2005. 
• Baez, John C. (ed.) (1994). Knots and quantum gravity. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-853490-6. 
• Baez, John C.; Segal, & Muniain, Javier (1994). Gauge fields, knots and gravity. Singapore: World Scientific. ISBN 981-02-2034-0. 
• Baez, John C.; Segal, Irving E.; and Zhou, Zhenfang (1992). Introduction to algebraic and constructive quantum field theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-08546-3. 

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• Baez's home page
• This Week's Finds
• The n-Category Café, a physics/mathematics/philosophy blog by Baez, philosopher David Corfield, and physicist Urs Schreiber
• John C. Baez at the Mathematics Genealogy Project