Healthy Scepticism in the Ranks

Yesterday Andreas Recknagel gave our first mathematics colloquium of the year. We heard a very rapid overview of unification, string theory and conformal field theory that finished up with T-duality and mirror symmetry. He even showed us some "strings" he had in his pockets to describe the winding number. The talk was peppered with good humour the first occurred at the outset where he described "the string factory" to us, here are my notes on it: