At The Monastery

I've decided to live in a monastery for two weeks, along with several other physicists and mathematicians. It is quite pleasant. We have breakfast at 7:30am, lunch at 12:30pm, and dinner at 7:30pm. The latter two are proper sit-down affairs with several courses. We are served by several stern French women of an appropriate level of uncompromising sternness and impatience, who are -frankly- slightly scary. I'm looking forward to tonight's dinner especially, since the Thursday night special is one of my all-time favourite French dishes (and word)... Bouillabaisse. It is a local specialty. By now you've probably guessed, I'm in Provence (which I like to think of as a sort of prototype of Southern California, but that's another story). In particular, just outside Marseille, on the edge of the Mediterranean. The monastery is in fact the Centre International de Rencontres Mathematiques: C.I.R.M., as you can read on the doorway. Each day I wake up, eat, go to lectures, work in my room, work in the library, talk to people, and work some more. Apparently it is quite beautiful in the surroundings, but I've not gone to look yet. Maybe I will on the weekend. So what have I learned? Well, the setup is excellent. There are both mathematicians and physicists here, and a wide range of talks. In fact, the title of the workshop has "Affine Hecke Algebras" in it. If you stopped me in the street and asked me what an Affine Hecke algebra is, I'd have to tell you that I don't know what the Helle they are in any precise sense, but that does not matter. I'm learning a lot about what's been going on in some aspects of the physics and mathematics world in some areas, with a pleasingly European flavour which reminds me of my youth, since a lot of the European string theory and statistical mechanics stars from my past (gosh, almost 20 years ago!) seem to be here. At the same time, to my surprise, several relatively freshly minted young researchers that I know from over the water are here. It is nice. There have been several excellent talks. Particularly so since the physicists have been careful to spend the first half of their talk giving a general introduction for the benefit of the mathematicians before diving into technical details. As a result, while I am not sure that the mathematicians really benefit from this as much as is hoped, I think it just makes for a great 90 minute (with 5 minute break) physics talk for the physicists. As a result, you get a good idea of what the issues (at least in the mind of the presenter) are, and a bit of the background and history, before they go on to tell you what they have actually done recently. For example, Martin Schnabl just reported on what can only be described as spectacularly important nice results (see the paper, hep-th/0511286, here). Here he is, in action at the lovely multi-panelled blackboard which he used to great effect: