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John Baez of the University of California, Riverside, works on quantum
gravity and mathematical tools called n-categories. So it’s no surprise to find
him engrossed in Hirotaka Tamanoi’s Elliptic Genera and Vertex Operator
Super-Algebras(Springer-Verlag, £34, ISBN 3540660062). But Baez’s
travel reading isn’t always that heavyweight. On his last trip, he read Simon
Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity,
and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (Harper Perennial,
£9/$13, ISBN 006099486X), which, he says, is “very entertaining”.
He’s currently reading Neutron Star (Ballantine, $6.99 ISBN
0345336941)—not another work on deformed space, but Larry…