Which made me laugh and then reflect that I should get out more. Oh well. Hope you’re having a good time in Jhb Paul. Don’t forget my jelly tots!

We are the Transformers when we need ‘em.

As regards the new and old directions, it’s hard to explain without a lengthy excursion into some principles of string theory. Basically, the old area was an aspect of what is called AdS/CFT correspondence, which is a mapping from (typically) ten-dimensional supersymmetric gravity theories (ie. curved space), to (typically) four dimensional quantum field theories (ie. particles). The attraction of the correspondence is that it allows one to solve hard problems on one side by transforming them to easy problems on the other side. We were trying to extend some recent work which had classified a particular class of the supersymmetric gravity solutions (specifically, those with maximal supersymmetry), entirely in terms of a single function on a distinguished two-dimensional surface.

The new work is part of the growing ability of string theory to explain black hole entropy in terms of actual states of D-branes, a particular object in string theory. We are looking at some recent work that does some of these calculations by using a duality between two types of string theory, compactified (dimensionally reduced) on various particularly-weird six-dimensional spaces.

Anyway, that was probably unintelligible. I can try to expand on some of the things I mentioned, if anyone is interested.

*pause*

Oh, there were no actual Fourier Transforms *shudder* I hate Fourier transforms, the only good thing about them is that they’re not LaPlacian Transforms. Horrid, horrid things.

By the way, for clarity, you might consider talking about what this new diretion in research is, and how it differs from your old direction. And pursue your Fourier analogy further. I’d like to see where it goes.