John C. Baez

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This article is about John C. Baez, the American mathematical physicist. For John Baez the video game programmer and creator of the video game Alien Hominid, see The Behemoth.

John Carlos Baez (b. 1961) is an American mathematical physicist at the University of California, Riverside. He is well known in the field for his work on spin foams in loop quantum gravity. More recently, his research has focused on applications of higher categories to physics.

Baez is known to science fans in the UseNet community as the author of This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics, an irregular column on the web featuring gossip, exposition and criticism. Baez started This Week's Finds in 1993, and it has a worldwide following. This Week's Finds anticipated the concept of a personal weblog. Baez is also known on the World Wide Web as the author of an ironical crackpot index.

Baez earned his Ph.D. at MIT in 1986, under the direction of Irving Segal. In one of his posts, Baez mentioned that he can trace his mathematical genealogy back to the famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. According to the [The Mathematics Genealogy Project], his mathematical family net is as shown in this diagram:

Abbreviated mathematical genealogy of John Baez

In this figure, the topology is a causal net rather than a simple tree, possibly because Weierstrass's doctorate was an honorary degree. Since John Baez is a fan of the work of Vladimir Nabokov, who is well known for his obscure references, we might also point out that Nikolai Bugaev was the father of the novelist Andrei Bely.

Biologically, the singer Joan Baez is John Baez's cousin.

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