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Eric Weinstein


 In a blog post this summer I discussed Eric Weinstein, a VC manager trained as a mathematician.

I said, quite incidentally, that Weinstein received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard with a thesis on the extension of self-dual Yang-Mills equations. I also admitted that I don't know what that means.

So, dear reader, let us struggle a bit with what that means.

Back in 1954 Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills developed ideas loosely called "gauge symmetry" in order to describe the strong nuclear force. The "strong" nuclear force is the one that has to counter-act electromagnetism at the subatomic level.  That is: two protons stick together in a nucleus even though both are positively charged so, given our understanding of EM, they "ought" to be flying apart.  

Yang got his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago in 1948 and thereafter was briefly an assistant to Enrico Fermi.

His work with Mills in essence outlined the mathematics of a scenario in which the carrier particles of a force can themselves radiate further carrier particles.     

So Weinstein's work in some sense builds upon the Yang-Mills equations developed in that context. 

The Yang-Mills equations define fields with curvature. The term "self-dual" describes a feature of that curvature.  Beyond that, I'd just be typing in lieu of understanding.  

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