Hi everybody!

Despite all the obstacles in these boring pandemia times, I have been thinking that it would be nice to try and start a journal club for the "string" group of the IGFAE. I guess everybody is familiar with the concept, but the idea is to meet every two weeks and have informal discussions about anything that we consider interesting. This could mean discussing recent papers, old ones, presenting our own work, etc.

The concrete topics are of course not constrained and can be as wide as our research interests are. Hopefully this will be useful to learn topics that are a little out of each one's expertise and help us get in contact with each other's interests.

Regarding the mechanics of the sessions, I suggest that we try to design them as interactive as possible meaning that we must think of  the "speaker" as leading a discussion rather than presenting a seminar. Also along this line, the use of a blackboard (physical or electronic via tablet in zoom) is greatly encouraged over slides presentations.

The logistics is something we can all decide. I propose to do it every two Wednesdays at 12:00, for example. If someone has a problem with this timetable, please let me know and we can try to find a better time that suits everybody.

For the first session next week, I myself will lead a discussion about JT gravity (and its connection to Random Matrix Theory), which is a topic that has attracted some attention along the last few years (I will send a later email with more details). If there is interest in the topic I am also willing to extend it to a second session, but I would need another speaker for the third one. If anybody is interested in doing so, please send me an email :)

I hope you find my proposal interesting and we manage to get ahead with it with everybody's engagement.

Cheers,

Javi