I did not make it to the annual “Strings xxxx” conference this year (where xxxx = current year), but I heard that it was good. It was held in Munich. See the lovely poster on the right. (I wonder who did the splendid painting?)
The organizers did a great job of rapidly updating the website with slides and video of the talks so that a wider audience can benefit from them. The video page is here, and slides are here. I was chatting with Hirosi Ooguri yesterday, and he mentioned that he did the traditional conference summary talk this year, joking that he seems to be destined to do it on Olympic years (he did it in Paris in 2004, which I recall, and also at CERN in 2008), and pointing out that he spent a bit of time in the talk charting some of the progress that took place from summary to summary. This is an interesting thing to do. [Update: I ran into John Schwarz at a reception just after writing this, and he says that his talk was in part a summary of some of the developments in the field -looks like it is part one of a series in conjunction with others- so those might be interesting to look at too, along with David Gross’ remarks on prospects looking forward. One of the encouraging notable things that Hirosi pointed out to me earlier is that there’s a great crop of young people doing excellent work, as can be seen from the list of interesting talks to look at.]
I’d say more, but since I can’t actually look at any of the videos due to the incredibly sucky web connection I have right now* in my accommodation here in Aspen, I cannot.
Here’s hoping your connection is better. Enjoy.
-cvj
*Equally annoyingly, all week I haven’t been able to catch up with the new episode of Newsroom on HBOGo due to this miserable connection.
I think the painting is “Fighting Forms” by Franz Marc.