Physics-wise I’ve enjoyed reading about instantons, large N gauge theories, topological string theory (I definitely recomomend the review by Vafa, it delves into toric geometry) and some superstring theory (RNS formalism, GSO projection, black hole microstates). Some other cool stuff is viewing the string B-field as a cohomology class, and probing the geometrical structure of CFTs (the sort of thing they teach mathematicians about QFT and CFT). That said, I feel like my current interests have slightly shifted to be more gravity-oriented. As such, topics like the holographic principle, the information paradox, the S-matrix in a gravitational theory, AdS black holes (and general black hole thermodynamics) and proto-quantum gravity have really interested me. I am also looking at real algebraic topology - stuff like CW approximations and Postnikov towers (I really want to see what the $\mathrm{Fivebrane}$ group is all about), and I also picked up Nakahara again because of it’s nice review of anomalies and $\mathrm{GL(4,\mathrm R)}$ gauge theory.
I’ve also been exploring some interesting deep learning models in depth, some of which echo my interests of 1 whole year (!) ago, including Graph CNNs for drug design, LSTMs and VAEs for music generation, and R-CNNs for object detection and recognition. I solved some Project Euler problems too, here’s my account:
