Apr 7, 2009 Here are the slides for a talk explaining some hypotheses relating n-categories and topology, and Jacob Lurie’s new work on these hypotheses. Ben-Zvi’s Lectures on Topological Field Theory ...

The following is the greatest math talk I’ve ever watched! Etienne Ghys (with pictures and videos by Jos Leys), Knots and Dynamics, ICM Madrid 2006. [See below the fold for some links.] I wasn’t ...

I don’t really think mathematics is boring. I hope you don’t either. But I can’t count the number of times I’ve launched into reading a math paper, dewy-eyed and eager to learn, only to have my ...

Most recently, the Applied Category Theory Seminar took a step into linguistics by discussing the 2010 paper Mathematical Foundations for a Compositional Distributional Model of Meaning, by Bob Coecke ...

an appreciation of Bill Lawvere’s work in this direction. More is behind the above link. The idea behind the term is that a geometric space is roughly something consisting of points or pieces that are ...

Whether we grow up to become category theorists or applied mathematicians, one thing that I suspect unites us all is that we were once enchanted by prime numbers. It comes as no surprise then that a ...

I want to talk about some attempts to connect the Standard Model of particle physics to the octonions. I should start out by saying I don’t have any big agenda here. It’d be great if the octonions — ...

I move jobs tomorrow: from Glasgow to Edinburgh, city of James Clerk Maxwell, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and Dolly the Sheep. But before I go, I want to give you the fourth and final ...

When is it appropriate to completely reinvent the wheel? To an outsider, that seems to happen a lot in category theory, and probability theory isn’t spared from this treatment. We’ve had a useful ...

The discussion on Tom’s recent post about ETCS, and the subsequent followup blog post of Francois, have convinced me that it’s time to write a new introductory blog post about type theory. So if ...

Over the last few years, I’ve been very slowly working up a short expository paper — requiring no knowledge of categories — on set theory done categorically. It’s now progressed to the stage where I’d ...

Summer saw the foundations of mathematics rocked by the publication of The HoTT Book. Here we are a few months later and the same has happened to physics with the appearance on the ArXiv of Urs’s ...