Resources

• First ever paper on "star-triangle relation" by A. E. Kennelly in 1899

• Ludwig Faddeev's Les Houches lecture "How Algebraic Bethe Ansatz works for integrable model"

• John Cardy's Les Houches lecture "Conformal Field Theory and Statistical Mechanics"

• Greg Kuperberg's brilliant proof of the alternating sign matrix conjecutre

• Lectures "A Graph-Theoretic Approach to Free-Fermion Solvability" by Adrian Chapman: Lecture I , Lecture II

• "Remembering Hans Bethe" (a precious collection of interviews with Hans Bethe)

• An inspiring biography of Lars Onsager

• The autobiography of Rodney J. Baxter

My Erdős number is 5: Paul Erdős → Daniel Kleitman → Elliott Lieb → Ian Affleck → Vincent Pasquier → Y.M.

My Einstein number is 5: Albert Einstein → Peter Bergmann → Joel Lebowitz → Bernard Derrida → Vincent Pasquier → Y.M.

Quotes

• "The great tragedy of Science [is] the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by a [experimental] fact." ---- T.H. Huxley, Biogenesis and abiogenesis, (1884)

• "With this wild beginning, I hope to have convinced the reader that whereas there may be nothing practical about the subsequent calculation, I find it meaningful in a happily nebulous, philosophic sense." ---- Elihu Lubkin, J. Math. Phys. 19, 1028 (1978)

• "Algebra is the offer made by the devil to the mathematician. The devil says: `I will give you this powerful machine, it will answer any question you like. All you need to do is give me your soul: give up geometry and you will have this marvellous machine.'" ---- Michael Atiyah

• La superficialità mi inquieta ma il profondo mi uccide. ---- Alda Merini