I’m at a conference this week. It’s named Elliptic Integrals in Fundamental Physics, but I think of it as “Elliptics 2022”, the latest in a series of conferences on elliptic integrals in particle physics.

Elliptics has been growing in recent years, hurtling into prominence as a subfield of amplitudes (which is already a subfield of theoretical physics). This has led to growing lists of participants and a more and more packed schedule.

This year walked all of that back a bit. There were three talks a day: two one-hour talks by senior researchers and one half-hour talk by a junior researcher. The rest, as well as the whole last day, are geared to discussion. It’s an attempt to go back to the subfield’s roots. In the beginning, the Elliptics conferences drew together a small group to sort out a plan for the future, digging through the often-confusing mathematics to try to find a baseline for future progress. The field has advanced since then, but some of our questions are still almost as basic. What relations exist between different calculations? How much do we value fast numerics, versus analytical understanding? What methods do we want to preserve, and which aren’t serving us well? To answer these questions, it helps to get a few people together in one place, not to silently listen to lectures, but to question and discuss and hash things out. I may have heard a smaller range of topics at this year’s Elliptics, but due to the sheer depth we managed to probe on those fewer topics I feel like I’ve learned much more.

Since someone always asks, I should say that the talks were not recorded, but they are posting slides online, so if you’re interested in the topic you can watch there. A few people discussed new developments, some just published and some yet to be published. I discussed the work I talked about last week, and got a lot of good feedback and ideas about how to move forward.