The Wolfram Summer School Fundamental Physics Track
Are you an advanced research-oriented student in mathematics, theoretical physics or theoretical computer science, who wants to make potentially cutting-edge contributions to our understanding of general relativity, quantum field theory and the foundations of mathematical physics?
Or perhaps your physics is a little rusty, but you’re a strong algorithmic programmer who’s enthusiastic about writing robust, scalable code that may help increase our understanding of the universe?
The Wolfram Physics Project comprises a small team of mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists, led by Stephen Wolfram, dedicating to investigating Wolfram models: a new class of discrete models for the fundamental structure of spacetime. And through the Wolfram Summer School’s newly-inaugurated Fundamental Physics track, we’re offering you the unprecedented opportunity to join our team for a few weeks, and help contribute to our investigation.
Our formalism appears to have deep connections to many branches of pure mathematics (such as higher-order category theory, topos theory and geometric group theory), theoretical physics (such as loop quantum gravity, twistor theory, string theory and conformal field theory) and theoretical computer science (such as term rewriting theory, geometric complexity theory and quantum information theory). However, many of these connections are currently only barely explored or understood, so we’re particularly excited to hear from graduate students and other researchers with expertise in these fields.
We also especially welcome applicants from professional algorithmic programming backgrounds with experience in relevant areas, such as graph theory, distributed computing and virtual reality.
A project in the Fundamental Physics track has the potential to be turned into an academic publication, or even to form the basis of a bachelor's/master's/doctoral thesis; particularly successful projects may also be featured as part of the Wolfram Physics Project itself. It is our hope that, in addition to your expertise being valuable to our project, some of the recent insights from our project may also help to inform and energize your own future research work.
This year, our summer school will be run as a fully immersive digital experience from June 28 until July 17. You can apply via our website until May 24; we hope to hear from you very soon.
Looking forward to meeting you all in a few weeks' time!
Jonathan Gorard
Director of the WSS Physics Track
Principal Researcher, Wolfram Physics Project
