Stephen Hawking is retiring. The professorial Chair once occupied by Isaac Newton is vacant.

The Board of Electors to the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics invite applications for this Professorship, to take up appointment on 1 October 2009 or as soon as possible thereafter.

Applications are invited from persons working on mathematics applied to the physical world, with strong preference for the broad area of theoretical physics.

The appointment will be subject to the Statutes and Ordinances of the University.

Form an orderly queue.

From Robert Reich’s Blog

Pardon me for asking, but if a company is too big to fail, maybe – just maybe – it’s too big, period.

We used to have public policies to prevent companies from getting too big. Does anyone remember antitrust laws? Somewhere along the line policymakers decided that antitrust would only be used where there was evidence a company had so much market power it could keep prices higher than otherwise.

We seem to have forgotten that the original purpose of antitrust law was also to prevent companies from becoming too powerful. Too powerful in that so many other companies depended on them, so many jobs turned on them, and so many consumers or investors or depositors needed them – that the economy as a whole would be endangered if they failed. Too powerful in that they could wield inordinate political influence – of a sort that might gain them extra favors from Washington.

He’s right. But guess what? In trying to contain the financial panic, governments here and everywhere are creating even bigger behemoths.

At the age of 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to walk from Rotterdam to Istanbul, equipped only with a stick, a rucksack, a notebook and a gift for languages. This is the first of the two retrospective volumes in which he recounted his adventures. It’s a ravishing book, which has made me revisit my own memories of various places on the Continent where he passed through in the 1930s. I lived and worked in Holland for a year in the 1970s, for example, and have loved the country ever since, so his summary resonated with me:

“I was astonished … at the impressive, clear beauty of the country and its variety, the amazing light and the sway of its healing and collusive charm. No wonder it had produced so many painters! And the Dutch themselves? Although we were reciprocally tongue-tied, the contact was not as light as these pages must suggest. On foot, unlike other forms of travel, it is impossible to be out of touch; and our exchanges were enough, during this brief journey, to leave a deposit of liking and admiration which has lasted ever since.”

He’s very perceptive about the Dutch landscape and its eerie, consoling familiarity — the product of centuries of painterly mastery. I lived in the East of the country, near the German border, but often drove to Amsterdam by myself on Saturday afternoons, and I remember vividly how oddly familiar the landscape seemed as I neared the coast, especially in the winter.

“If there is a foreign landscape familiar to English eyes by proxy, it is this one; by the time they see the original, a hundred morning and afternoons in museums and picture galleries and country houses have done their work. These confrontations and recognition-scenes filled the journey with excitement and delight. The nature of the landscape itself, the colour, the light, the openness, the expanse and the detail of the towns and the villages are leagued together in the weaving of a miraculously consoling and healing spell. Melancholy is exorcised, chaos chased away and wellbeing, alacrity of spirit and a thoughtful calm take their place.”

I’ve always thought that if I were deported from the UK as an undesirable alien, Holland is where I would settle.