The Unapologetic Mathematician

Well, despite being scoopedon this, I’m going to help out Scott Carter’s own shameless self-promotion with some shameless other-promotion. That intro having covered both Leibnizean monads…

Not content with being a great mathematician and quite the host, Scott has also been known to pluck a guitar string or six in his day. And despite being able to actually play a guitar, he’s not half bad at Guitar Hero, as we found out back at Knots In Washington about a year or so ago.

And now you can hear his musical stylings on the intarwebs, with “The Quantum Gravity Topological Quantum Field Theory Blues”

I’ve been calculating
I said I’ve been calculating
calculating all night long

Got a quasi- triangular Hopf algebra
and I wrote down the coproduct wrong.

I’ve been integrating
integrating the whole day through
I said I’ve been integrating
integrating the whole day through
Got a Chern-Simons functional integral
and its convergent, too.

I’ve been writing down knot diagrams
converting them to braids
Using the Alexander isotopy
you know I’m not afraid
I’ve been
assigning modules
to each of these six strings
been doin’ it for weeks now
and I still don’t understand a thing.

I’ve got them old Quantum Gravity
Topological Quantum Field Theory Blues
I’ve got them old Quantum Gravity
Topological Quantum Field Theory Blues
And without NSF funding I think that you would, too.