Beautiful Papers, September 1 - November 9, 2026

Structure:

We will discuss 8 papers which had huge impact in physics. One week Instructor Pedro Vieira will discuss a paper; students should read it beforehand. One week later students discuss recent papers referring to that paper (20 min each student, ~ 3 presentations; at the end of the class Pedro will grade the presentations based on “Physics”, “Presentation”, “Question handling”; and give comments).

By the end of the course, students will have explored a vast set of topics in theoretical physics — spotting potential gaps to be fixed — sharpened their presentation skills through steady practice, and sparked cross-disciplinary conversations through our shared physics language.

The papers: The papers we will cover (can find the pdfs in this spreadsheet):

Sept 1 & 8: On the Number of Prime Numbers less than a Given Quantity, Riemann, 1859

Sept 8 & 21: Limits on Massless Particles, Weinberg and Witten, 1980

Sept 22 & 28: Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities, Hopfield, 1982

Sept 29 & Oct 8: Anomalous Quantum Hall Effect: An Incompressible Quantum Fluid with Fractionally Charged Excitations, Laughlin, 1983

Oct 9 & 19: Why there is nothing rather than something, Coleman, 1988

Oct 20 & 26: Universality and Scaling in Gravitational Collapse of a Massless Scalar Field, Choptuik, 1993

Oct 27 & Nov 2: Simple geodesics and Weil-Petersson volumes of moduli spaces of bordered Riemann surfaces, Mirzakhani, 2007

Nov 3 & 9: Supersymmetry and Morse Theory, Witten, 1982

Location & Building Access: Please refer to the above spreadsheet for class location as it will vary from week to week. Perimeter Institute, 31 Caroline St N, Waterloo Participants who do not have an access card for Perimeter Institute must sign in at the security desk before each session. For information on parking or accessibility please contact [email protected].