John C. Baez

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John Carlos Baez (b. 1961) is an American mathematical physicist at the University of California, Riverside. He is well known in the field for his work on spin foams in loop quantum gravity. More recently, his research has focused on applications of higher categories to physics.

Baez is known to science fans in the Usenet community as the author of This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics, an irregular column on the web featuring gossip, exposition and criticism. Baez started This Week's Finds in 1993, and it has a worldwide following. This Week's Finds anticipated the concept of a personal weblog. Baez is also known on the World Wide Web as the author of an ironic crackpot index.

[edit] Trivia

Singer Joan Baez is his cousin.

Baez earned his Ph.D. at MIT in 1986, under the direction of Irving Segal. In one of his posts, Baez mentioned that he can trace his "mathematical genealogy" back to the famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss; the Mathematics Genealogy Project lists over 35,000 fellow scientists with whom Baez shares this lineage. Baez's lineage also includes other mathematical luminaries such as Weierstrass and Riesz. See the link to the Mathematics Genealogy Project below for details.

[edit] External links

• Baez's home page
• This Week's Finds

[edit] References

• John Carlos Baez. The Mathematics Genealogy Project. American Mathematical Society. Retrieved on August 13, 2005.

• Baez, John C. (ed.) (1994). Knots and quantum gravity. Oxford: Clarendon 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.