John Carlos Baez ( ; born June 12, 1961) is an American mathematical physicist and a professor of

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

at the

University of California, Riverside The University of California, Riverside (UCR or UC Riverside) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Riverside, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses of the University of Cali ...

(UCR) in Riverside, California. He has worked on spin foams in

loop quantum gravity Loop quantum gravity (LQG) is a theory of quantum gravity that incorporates matter of the Standard Model into the framework established for the intrinsic quantum gravity case. It is an attempt to develop a quantum theory of gravity based direc ...

, applications of higher categories to physics, and

applied category theory Applied category theory is an academic discipline in which methods from category theory are used to study other fields including but not limited to computer science, physics (in particular quantum mechanics), natural language processing, control th ...

. Additionally, Baez is known on the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

as the author of the

crackpot index The Crackpot Index is a number that rates scientific claims or the individuals that make them, in conjunction with a method for computing that number. It was proposed by John C. Baez in 1992, and updated in 1998. While the index was created for i ...

Education

John C. Baez attended

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

where he graduated with an A.B. in mathematics in 1982; his senior thesis was titled "Recursivity in quantum mechanics", under the supervision of John P. Burgess. He earned his doctorate in 1986 from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

under the direction of

Irving Segal Irving Ezra Segal (1918–1998) was an American mathematician known for work on theoretical quantum mechanics. He shares credit for what is often referred to as the Segal–Shale–Weil representation. Early in his career Segal became known for h ...

Career

Baez was a post-doctoral researcher at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

. Since 1989, he has been a faculty member at

UC Riverside The University of California, Riverside (UCR or UC Riverside) is a public land-grant research university in Riverside, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The main campus sits on in ...

. From 2010 to 2012, he was a visiting professor at the

Centre for Quantum Technologies The Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) in Singapore is a Research Centre of Excellence hosted by the National University of Singapore. The Centre brings together physicists, computer scientists and engineers to do basic research on quantum ph ...

in Singapore and continued working there in the summers until at least 2016.

Research

His research includes work on spin foams in

. He also worked on applications of higher categories to physics,John C. Baez and

Aaron Lauda According to the Old Testament of the Bible, Aaron ( or ) was an Israelite prophet, a high priest, and the elder brother of Moses. Information about Aaron comes exclusively from religious texts, such as the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament ( ...

, '' A Prehistory of n-Categorical Physics'', Deep Beauty, 13–128, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, (2011). such as the

cobordism hypothesis In mathematics, the cobordism hypothesis, due to John C. Baez and James Dolan, concerns the classification of extended topological quantum field theories (TQFTs). In 2008, Jacob Lurie outlined a proof of the cobordism hypothesis, though the detai ...

. He has also dedicated many efforts towards

, including network theory and has published over 105 papers.

Recognition

Baez won the 2013

Levi L. Conant Prize The Levi L. Conant Prize is a mathematics prize of the American Mathematical Society, which has been awarded since 2001 for outstanding expository papers published in the ''Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society'' or the ''Notices of the Ame ...

for his expository paper with John Huerta, "The algebra of grand unified theories". He was named a Fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

, in the 2022 class of fellows, "for contributions to higher category theory and mathematical physics, and for popularization of these subjects".

Forums

Baez is the author of ''This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics'', an irregular column on the internet featuring mathematical exposition and criticism. He started ''This Week's Finds'' in 1993 for the

Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

community, and it now has a following in its new form, the blog ''Azimuth''. ''This Week's Finds'' anticipated the concept of a personal

weblog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

. Baez creates blog posts about topics or questions he wants to understand more through his column publishings. ''Azimuth'' also covers other topics that include combating climate change and various other

environmental Environment most often refers to: __NOTOC__ * Natural environment, referring respectively to all living and non-living things occurring naturally and the physical and biological factors along with their chemical interactions that affect an organism ...

issues. He is also co-founder of the ''n''-Category Café (or ''n''-Café), a group blog concerning

higher category theory In mathematics, higher category theory is the part of category theory at a ''higher order'', which means that some equalities are replaced by explicit morphism, arrows in order to be able to explicitly study the structure behind those equalities. H ...

and its applications, as well as its philosophical repercussions. The founders of the blog are Baez,

David Corfield David Neil Corfield is a British philosopher specializing in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of psychology. He was Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent until 2024. Education Corfield studied mathematics at the Univer ...

and Urs Schreiber, and the list of blog authors has extended since. The ''n''-Café community is associated with the nLab, ''n''Lab wiki and ''n''Forum forum, which now run independently of ''n''-Café. It is hosted on University of Texas at Austin, The University of Texas at Austin's official website.

Family

Baez's uncle Albert Baez was a physicist and a co-inventor of the X-ray microscope; Albert interested him in physics as a child. Through Albert, he is cousins with singers Joan Baez and Mimi Fariña. John Baez is married to Lisa Raphals who is a professor of Chinese and comparative literature from ancient Greece at University of California, Riverside, UCR.

Selected publications

Papers

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Books

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References

External links

Baez's home page
at UCR's official website (ucr.edu)
Azimuth
blog by Baez
The ''n''-Category Café

Home page
in ''n''Lab

Essays

essay by Baez at The World Question Center {{DEFAULTSORT:Baez, John C. 1961 births 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians 21st-century American physicists American bloggers Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni Princeton University alumni Yale University fellows Usenet people Category theorists University of California, Riverside faculty Living people Loop quantum gravity researchers American relativity theorists Higher category theory American academics of Mexican descent Science bloggers 21st-century science writers Mathematicians from California Academics from San Francisco Hispanic and Latino American scientists Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Hispanic and Latino American physicists Historical treatment of octonions