Plus Magazine

Plus Magazine is a project of the Millennium Mathematics Project, which aims to increase the public awareness of mathematics, particularly among young people. The magazine appears four times a year and the website is updated regularly with news from the world of mathematics, together with a blog. It is highly recommended for anyone who is interested in mathematics, professionally or not.

The introduction to quantum geometry described in a recent post is from the latest edition of Plus.

An introduction to quantum geometry

Quantum geometry describes attempts to find new versions of classical geometry suited one of the major tasks in modern physics: finding a model of the universe that describes both quantum mechanics and gravity. In the linked article, this subject is introduced and explained for the non-specialist, by means of an interview with Prof. Shahn Majid, of Queen Mary, University of London, who has contributed several of the mathematical and physical ideas involved.

Note: Prof. Majid was my doctoral supervisor; my work with him was on the structure of algebraic objects related to quantum geometry, in the field colloquially known as the theory of "quantum groups".

Preprint: "On the inductive construction of quantized enveloping algebras" (arXiv:0706.0455)

A preprint of my latest paper is now available on the arXiv (the mathematical preprint repository) via the above link. The subject of this paper is a construction for a class of Hopf algebras called quantized enveloping algebras. The construction is a way of encoding in the algebraic structure the idea of adding nodes to the associated Dynkin diagrams.