John C. Baez

This article is about John C. Baez, the American mathematical physicist. For John Baez the video-game programmer and creator of the video game Alien Hominid, see The Behemoth.

John C. Baez
John C. Baez (August 2009).
Born	(1961-06-12) June 12, 1961 San Francisco, California, United States
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematics, Physics
Institutions	University of California, Riverside
Alma mater	Princeton University (undergraduate) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (post graduate)
Doctoral advisor	Irving Segal

John Carlos Baez (born June 12, 1961) is an American mathematical physicist and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) in Riverside, California. He is known for his work on spin foams in loop quantum gravity. More recently, his research has focused on applications of higher categories to physics and other things.

Baez is also known to science fans as the author of This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics, 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 worldwide following in its new form, the blog "Azimuth". This Week's Finds anticipated the concept of a personal weblog.^{[citation needed]} Additionally, Baez is known on the World Wide Web as the author of the crackpot index.

Early life and education

Baez was born in San Francisco, California. He graduated from Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics in 1982. In 1986, he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a Doctor of Philosophy under the direction of Irving Segal. After a post-doctoral period at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, he began teaching — since 1989 — at UCR.

Blogs

Baez runs the blog "Azimuth," where he writes about a variety of topics ranging from This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics to the current focus, combating climate change and various other environmental issues.

Baez is also co-founder of the n-Category Café (or nCafé), 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 ncafé community is associated with the nLab wiki and nForum forum, which now run independently of ncafé. It is hosted on The University of Texas at Austin's official website.

Family

Singer and progressive activist Joan Baez is his cousin and her father, physicist Albert Baez, was his uncle.

John Baez is married to Lisa Raphals who is a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at UCR.

Selected publications

• Baez, John C. (2002). "The Octonions". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 39 (2): 145–205. arXiv:math/0105155v4. doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-01-00934-X. ISSN 0273-0979. MR 1886087. 

References

• Baez, John C. (ed.) (1994). Knots and quantum gravity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, an imprint of the Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-853490-6. 
• Baez, John C.; Segal, & Muniain, Javier (1994). Gauge fields, knots and gravity. Singapore: World Scientific. ISBN 981-02-2034-0. 
• Baez, John C.; Segal, Irving E.; and Zhou, Zhenfang (1992). Introduction to algebraic and constructive quantum field theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-08546-3. 
• Baez, John C. (1996) Spin networks in gauge theory, Advances in Mathematics 117, 253-272
• Baez, John C. (1998) Quantum geometry & black hole entropy, w. A. Ashtekar, A. Corichi & K. Krasnov, Phys Rev. Lett. 80, 904-907.

External links

• Baez's home page at UCR's official website (ucr.edu)
• Azimuth blog by Baez
• The n-Category Café
• nLab, a wiki-lab for collaborative original research in mathematics, physics, and philosophy; see also nLab
• John C. Baez at the Mathematics Genealogy Project

Essays

• "Should I be thinking about quantum gravity?", essay by Baez at The World Question Center