John C. Baez
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John Carlos Baez (Template:IPAc-en Template:Respell;<ref>"John Baez Part 1"</ref> born June 12, 1961) is an American mathematical physicist and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Riverside (UCR)<ref>UC Riverside, Department of Mathematics</ref> in Riverside, California. He has worked on spin foams in loop quantum gravity, applications of higher categories to physics, and applied category theory. Additionally, Baez is known on the World Wide Web as the author of the crackpot index.
EducationEdit
John C. Baez attended Princeton University where he graduated with an A.B. in mathematics in 1982; his senior thesis was titled "Recursivity in quantum mechanics", under the supervision of John P. Burgess.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He earned his doctorate in 1986 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the direction of Irving Segal.<ref>Template:MathGenealogy</ref>
CareerEdit
Baez was a post-doctoral researcher at Yale University. Since 1989, he has been a faculty member at UC Riverside. From 2010 to 2012, he was a visiting professor at the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore and continued working there in the summers until at least 2016.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
ResearchEdit
His research includes work on spin foams in loop quantum gravity.<ref>Baez, John C. (1998), "Spin foam models", Class. & Quantum Gravity 15, 1827–1858</ref><ref>Top Cited Articles of All Time (2004 edition) in gr-qc</ref> He also worked on applications of higher categories to physics,<ref>John Baez Diary – January 2010, 1 January 2010</ref><ref name="BL">John C. Baez and Aaron Lauda, A Prehistory of n-Categorical Physics, Deep Beauty, 13–128, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, (2011).</ref> such as the cobordism hypothesis. He has also dedicated many efforts towards applied category theory, including network theory<ref>John Baez, Network theory.</ref> and has published over 105 papers.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
RecognitionEdit
Baez won the 2013 Levi L. Conant Prize for his expository paper with John Huerta, "The algebra of grand unified theories".<ref name=conant/> He was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, in the 2022 class of fellows, "for contributions to higher category theory and mathematical physics, and for popularization of these subjects".<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
ForumsEdit
Baez is the author of This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics,<ref>This Week's Finds</ref> an irregular column on the internet featuring mathematical exposition and criticism. He started This Week's Finds in 1993 for the Usenet community, and it now has a following in its new form, the blog Azimuth. This Week's Finds anticipated the concept of a personal weblog.<ref>Lieven LeBruyn, The unbearable lightness of math-blogging, August 23, 2007</ref> Baez creates blog posts about topics or questions he wants to understand more through his column publishings.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Azimuth also covers other topics that include combating climate change and various other environmental issues.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
He is also co-founder of the Template:Anchorn-Category Café (or n-Café), a group blog concerning higher category theory and its applications, as well as its philosophical repercussions. The founders of the blog are Baez, David Corfield and Urs Schreiber, and the list of blog authors has extended since. The n-Café community is associated with the nLab wiki and nForum forum, which now run independently of n-Café. It is hosted on The University of Texas at Austin's official website.
FamilyEdit
Baez's uncle Albert Baez was a physicist and a co-inventor of the X-ray microscope; Albert interested him in physics as a child.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Through Albert, he is cousins with singers Joan Baez and Mimi Fariña.
John Baez is married to Lisa Raphals who is a professor of Chinese and comparative literature from ancient Greece at UCR.<ref>February 17, 2007 – Lisa Raphals and I got married today! (Diary – February 2007)</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Selected publicationsEdit
PapersEdit
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BooksEdit
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ReferencesEdit
External linksEdit
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- Baez's home page at UCR's official website (ucr.edu)
- Azimuth blog by Baez
- The n-Category Café
- Home page in nLab
EssaysEdit
- "Should I be thinking about quantum gravity?", essay by Baez at The World Question Center