Catégories

Languages studied chiefly through their surviving literature rather than through speakers: Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and their kin.

The motion of bodies under forces, from Newtonian dynamics to Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations.

The philology of Greek and Latin: the transmission of the ancient texts, their language, and the editions everything else is read from.

Climate rather than weather: the statistics of the atmosphere over decades and longer, the processes that set them, and how and why they change.

Mental disorder as a research subject: how it is classified and assessed, what causes it, and which treatments actually work.

Language treated as an outgrowth of general cognition, with meaning grounded in conceptual structure, metaphor and construal rather than in a grammar module of its own.

The mental processes behind behaviour: perception, attention, memory, language and reasoning, studied by experiment.

The mind studied jointly by the disciplines that have a claim on it: perception, memory, reasoning and language, approached through experiment, computation and the brain at once.

Finding the best object in a finite but enormous set: routing, scheduling, matching, and the hardness results that bound what is possible.

Counting, arranging and choosing: the study of finite structures and how many of them there are.

The law of business dealing and of the company itself: incorporation, governance, securities, insolvency and the trade transactions in between.

Well-being taken as a property of communities rather than individuals, and the study of interventions pitched at that level.

The theory of commutative rings and their ideals, and the algebraic ground on which algebraic geometry is built.

School systems set against each other: what one country's arrangement achieves that another's does not, and how badly the international league tables mislead.

What legal systems do with the same problem and why they differ: the common law and civil law families, legal transplants, and the traditions that cut across both.

Literature read across languages and traditions: influence and circulation, and what a text looks like once it has crossed a border.

Politics studied across cases: how regimes, parties, elections and institutions differ from one country to the next, and what explains the difference.

Behaviour and cognition compared across species, both for their own sake and for what they place in context about our own.

Religions set against each other: myth, ritual, scripture and institution compared across traditions, and the question of what they have in common at all.

The law against cartels, abuse of market power and mergers that would foreclose a market. The area where legal doctrine leans hardest on economic analysis.