Seminar on “This Week’s Finds”

Summer is coming to a close! It’s almost time to continue my seminars on topics from This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics. As before, I’ll be doing these on Thursdays at 3:00 pm UK time in Room 6206 of the James Clerk Maxwell Building, home of the School of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh.

The first talk will be on Thursday September 21st, and the last on November 30th. I’ll skip October 19th and 27th… and any days there are strikes.

We’re planning to

1) make the talks hybrid on Zoom so that you can join online:

https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/82270325098
Meeting ID: 822 7032 5098
Passcode: XXXXXX36

Here the X’s stand for the name of the famous lemma in category theory.

2) make lecture notes available on my website.

3) record them and eventually make them publicly available on my YouTube channel.

4) have a Zulip channel on the Category Theory Community Server dedicated to discussion of the seminars: it’s here.

More details soon!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 27th, 2023 at 1:19 pm and is filed under mathematics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to Seminar on “This Week’s Finds”

  1. John Baez says:
    13 September, 2023 at 10:57 am

    The first couple talks will be about this:

    • Categorification and the periodic table of n-categories

    Categorification is a not-completely-systematic process of taking known math and replacing sets by categories, functions by functors, and equations by natural isomorphisms. Often categorifying simple results in math leads to deeper, more interesting results. When we iterate categorification we’re pushed into higher categories. Higher categories exhibit striking patterns visible in the “periodic table” of n-categories, such as the Stabilization Hypothesis, Tangle Hypothesis and Cobordism Hypothesis. I’ll concentrate on sketching the basic ideas, since the evidence is much easier to explain than the rigorous proofs. This will be a very elementary introduction to n-categories.

    Then I’ll talk for a while about how combinatorics is categorified ring theory… and then other stuff.

    The first talk is on Thursday September 21st; there may be a strike on the following Thursday, in which case I’ll postpone the second talk.

    Reply

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