It turns out that the standard picture of Adrien-Marie Legendre was actually a picture of his contemporary, the revolutionary Louis Legendre. (See the Notices article for the story. Gérard P. Michon has a photograph of the only known portrait of...

Oswaldo Zapata Marín is writing a series of essays about the history of superstring theory at Spinning the Superweb. His first essay, On Facts in Superstring Theory, describes something that is very mysterious to me as a math person: the process by...

If you’re interested in large cardinals, Akihiro Kanamori has made available a (typed rather than typeset) version of his and Magidor’s survey paper, The Evolution of Large Cardinal Axioms in Set Theory. If you’re interested in more advanced set...

Via Peter Woit I see that there is a project to put the archives of Bourbaki online. These are the internal manuscripts that the group generated while writing their famous series of books.

I just ran across an interesting weblog. Henry Wilton taught a course in the spring on geometric group theory, which is the use of topological techniques to prove theorems in group theory. He had his students write up the lecture notes for each...