I have unaccountably forgotten to mention that the June/July Notices of the AMS are available. In addition to the feature articles (about Ramanujan and the Clay Institute), there is a review of Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality. Penrose attempts the obviously impossible task of providing a complete survey of all of modern physics (including string theory and loop quantum gravity) accessible to a nontechnical audience, but with mathematical details. I thought the review was oddly negative: Penrose is attempting something of immense ambition, ambition that cannot help but fall short of its goal, so it’s not surprising that he doesn’t fully succeed.

This month’s What is… is about coarse spaces, which are a new concept to me.