Edward Frenkel
UC Berkeley Prof. Edward Frenkel @edfrenkel is one of the world's great mathematical minds. He has just decided to launch a video-podcast called AfterMath.
This is just beginning today and should mature and be amazing.
In my opinion, knowing Ed as I do, It certainly has the potential to change everything in the space of high level science communication around both Mathematics and Physics (Particularly Quantum Field Theory).
Within mathematics Ed is unusually approachable, with collaborative work across film, art, literature, philosophy and psychology. He and I have known each other since Harvard snatched him from the Soviet Union at its bitter end to come to our math department. Years later we reconnected and started going on various adventures in the US and abroad. I believe I even had a breakthrough in my own work when we even spent an entire surreal week completely covered in alkaline dust arguing about cinema and particle theory in a tiny two man tent, with most details mercifully lost to history, vodka and the Burning Man playa.
In any event, it is very uncommon for research mathematicians to use words like 'Genius', but that is probably how Ed struck us American graduate students in the department at the time; an always smiling Russian immigrant of few English words, who seemed to understand everything across the hardest fields almost instantly. My recollection was that it took him around one year to get a PhD. Something like that.
Ed has since matured into a fine author and public speaker with fantastic command of American English. While he is just getting started on his chanel, he already brings up a great point in his first video that I don't think I ever fully considered and just discussed with him last night: mathematics is not communicated or learned through sensory input. We can build visual models or use symbols, but the actual structures we discover are not sensory in nature. And that this leads to disorientation because in some sense they are built inside the mind without any experience of them having come in (via our senses) from the outside world.
Subscribe to @edfrenkel on @X and on his YouTube channel. This is likely to eventually wend its way up to the most beautiful but otherwise inaccessible science content that we almost never get in the public sphere, presented by a top researcher (rather than a popularizer) at the height of his powers.
I want to end on a personal note despite the dangers of being 'real' on X.
When a mathematics or physics PhD leaves academic research departments behind to work on research on their own, it is very difficult to function. It is almost impossible.
For the last 10-15 years, Ed Frenkel has been like a one man research department for me to talk about Differential Geometry, Representation Theory, Algebraic Topology/Homotopy Theory, Particle Theory of the Standard Model, General Relativity, Geometric and Quantum Field Theory, Lie Theory, Differential Topology, Elliptic Operators, Category theory, Spinorial Algebra, etc.
Whatever I have needed to discuss across a very broad range of topics, Ed has been able to meet me. I speak from experience: other than another man named David Kazhdan (a coauthor of Ed's), I have not seen this easy ability to switch contexts at a personal level. Edward is not just a remarkable mind, but an extraodinary individual, and friend at multiple different levels.
Ed: Congratulations. I couldn't be more excited for you brother. Looking forward.
Thank you, @EricRWeinstein ! 🙏🏻
UC Berkeley Prof. Edward Frenkel @edfrenkel is one of the world's great mathematical minds. He has just decided to launch a video-podcast called AfterMath.
This is just beginning today and should mature and be amazing.
[Cochain complex by London Tsai.]
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