Both kinds of course are valuable. The first is like teaching ETCS via the general notion of category, more or less as in Lawvere and Rosebrugh’s book Sets for Mathematics. The second is like my ...

In Part 1, I explained my hopes that classical statistical mechanics reduces to thermodynamics in the limit where Boltzmann’s constant k k approaches zero. In Part 2, I explained exactly what I mean ...

Why do I care? As we’ll see later, classical statistical mechanics features a crucial formula that involves a Laplace transform. So it would be great if we could find some parameter β \beta in that ...

Jul 23, 2009 Dominc Verity characterizes the descent condition for infinity-groupoid valued presheaves that happen to take values in strict infinity-groupoids.

Earlier this month the Mathematics Institute at Uppsala University hosted a conference called Categorification in Algebra and Topology, clearly a theme close to our collective heart. As yet there are ...

May 22, 2009 Charles Wells has a new blog. I especially like the entries on ‘sketches’ and on ‘how “math is logic” ruined mathematics for a generation’. Cobordism and Topological Field Theories Week 5 ...

Jan 26, 2009 A new paper shows how to build the string Lie 2-algebra by taking a compact Lie group with its canonical closed 3-form and then using ideas from multisymplectic geometry.

Sep 10, 2024 15:21 By the way, I always thought of the “I summed the series” anecdote (about the total distance flown by a ...

May 16, 2019 A summary of some ideas from the paper “Monads, partial evaluations and rewriting” by Tobias Fritz and Paolo Perrone. An Operational Semantics of Simply-Typed Lambda Calculus With String ...

I’m trying to work out how classical statistical mechanics can reduce to thermodynamics in a certain limit. I sketched out the game plan in Part 1 but there are a lot of details to hammer out. While I ...

A physical framework often depends on some physical constants that we can imagine varying, and in some limit one framework may reduce to another. This suggests that we should study a ‘moduli space’ or ...

Physicists like to study all sorts of simplified situations, but here’s one I haven’t seen them discuss. I call it an ‘energy particle’. It’s an imaginary thing with no qualities except energy, which ...