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Robbert Dijkgraaf

Contributing Columnist

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The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge

By Robbert Dijkgraaf
October 20, 2021
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Today’s powerful but little-understood artificial intelligence breakthroughs echo past examples of unexpected scientific progress.

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Contemplating the End of Physics

By Robbert Dijkgraaf
November 24, 2020
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Has physics reached the limits of what we can discover — or are the possibilities only just beginning?

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The Two Forms of Mathematical Beauty

By Robbert Dijkgraaf
June 16, 2020
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Mathematicians typically appreciate either generic or exceptional beauty in their work, but one type is more useful in describing the universe.

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Remembering the Unstoppable Freeman Dyson

By Robbert Dijkgraaf
April 13, 2020
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Freeman Dyson — physicist, mathematician, writer and idea factory — died on February 28, but his vitality lives on.

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The Subtle Art of the Mathematical Conjecture

By Robbert Dijkgraaf
May 7, 2019
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It’s an educated guess, not a proof. But a good conjecture will guide math forward, pointing the way into the mathematical unknown.

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There Are No Laws of Physics. There’s Only the Landscape.

By Robbert Dijkgraaf
June 4, 2018
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Scientists seek a single description of reality. But modern physics allows for many different descriptions, many equivalent to one another, connected through a vast landscape of mathematical possibility.

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To Solve the Biggest Mystery in Physics, Join Two Kinds of Law

By Robbert Dijkgraaf
September 7, 2017
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Reductionism breaks the world into elementary building blocks. Emergence finds the simple laws that arise out of complexity. These two complementary ways of viewing the universe come together in modern theories of quantum gravity.

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Quantum Questions Inspire New Math

By Robbert Dijkgraaf
March 30, 2017
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In order to fully understand the quantum world, we may have to develop a new realm of mathematics.

About the author

Robbert Dijkgraaf is director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is an author, with Abraham Flexner, of The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge.
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