Ever since the discovery of AdS/CFT duality 25 years ago, theorists have sought Minkowski space analogs. I will give an elementary introduction to some of the progress in recent years. First, I will say a bit about Mike.
In the early 2000s, one often heard that the vacuum counting problem in string theory was like a spin glass problem. My talk will review results of Douglas, Shiffman, and myself on probabilistic methods for counting vacua of certain string theories. I then review some more recent results by various mathematicians on critical points of p-spin Hamiltonians. These results do not seem to be well...
We introduce a novel framework for optimization based on energy-conserving Hamiltonian dynamics in a strongly mixing (chaotic) regime and establish some of its key properties analytically and numerically. The prototype is a discretization of Born-Infeld dynamics, with a squared relativistic speed limit depending on the objective function. This class of frictionless, energy-conserving...
