My Students

John Baez

October 24, 2005

Here's a picture of my grad students as of the summer of 2004. I'm very proud of them all! They're smart and lots of fun. If any of them asks you for a job, you should instantly hire them.

From left to right they are:

• Derek Wise, who wrote about p-form electromagnetism on discrete spacetimes, exotic statistics for strings, and MacDowell-Mansouri gravity and Cartan Geometry. While a student here he created beautiful notes for our Quantum Gravity Seminar, from Fall 2003 to Spring 2007. In the spring of 2007 he finished his thesis and went on to a postdoc at U. C. Davis.

• Jeffrey Morton, who wrote about categorified algebra and quantum mechanics and the role of cobordisms with corners in topological quantum field theory, especially the Dijkgraaf-Witten model. In the spring of 2007 he finished his thesis and went on to a postdoc with Dan Christensen at the University of Western Ontario.

• Alissa Crans, who worked on aspects of higher gauge theory, namely Lie 2-algebras and their relation to topology. We wrote a paper together on this stuff. In June 2004 she gave a nice lecture on higher linear algebra at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications - check out her lecture notes. In August of 2004 she finished her PhD thesis. She then started teaching at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. This was close enough that we could easily keep on collaborating, so we wrote a paper on loop groups and 2-groups with a couple of friends.

• Toby Bartels, who wrote many expository papers including especially nice ones on quaternionic quantum mechanics and the theory of properties, structure and stuff. In June 2006, he finished his thesis on higher gauge theory.

• Miguel Carrión Álvarez, who found a beautiful generalization of the Gelfand-Naimark theorem. Miguel typed up detailed notes of the Fall 2000 and Winter 2001 sessions of the quantum gravity seminar, which dealt with spin networks and topological field theory. Someday these may become a book! In December 2004, he finished his thesis on Wilson loop dynamics for the quantized electromagnetic field. In the process he became a bit of an expert on analysis on noncompact Riemannian manifolds. Now he's in London working in mathematical finance.

If you think they're so cute you want an even bigger picture, click here.

If you want to learn more about their research, click here.

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