John C. Baez's Blog, page 50

Applied Category Theory Meeting at UCR

 

The American Mathematical Society is having their Fall Western meeting here at U. C. Riverside during the weekend of November 9th and 10th, 2019. Joe Moeller and I are organizing a session on Applied Category Theory! We already have some great speakers lined up:

• Tai-Danae Bradley
• Vin de Silva
• Brendan Fong
• Nina Otter
• Evan Patterson
• Blake Pollard
• Prakash Panangaden
• David Spivak
• Brad Theilman
• Dmitry Vagner
• Zhenghan Wang

Alas, we have no funds for travel and lodging. If...

Nonstandard Models of Arithmetic

There seems to be a murky abyss lurking at the bottom of mathematics. While in many ways we cannot hope to reach solid ground, mathematicians have built impressive ladders that let us explore the depths of this abyss and marvel at the limits and at the power of mathematical reasoning at the same time.

This is a quote from Matthew Katz and Jan Reimann’s book An Introduction to Ramsey Theory: Fast Functions, Infinity, and Metamathematics. I’ve been been talking to my old friend Michael Weiss...

Quantum Physics and Logic 2019

There’s another conference involving applied category theory at Chapman University!

• Quantum Physics and Logic 2019, June 9-14, 2019, Chapman University, Beckman Hall 404. Organized by Matthew Leifer, Lorenzo Catani, Justin Dressel, and Drew Moshier.

The QPL series started out being about quantum programming languages, but it later broadened its scope while keeping the same acronym. This conference series now covers quite a range of topics, including the category-theoretic study of physical...

The Monoidal Grothendieck Construction

My grad student Joe Moeller is talking at the 4th Symposium on Compositional Structures this Thursday! He’ll talk about his work with Christina Vasilakopolou, a postdoc here at U.C. Riverside. Together they created a monoidal version of a fundamental construction in category theory: the Grothendieck construction! Here is their paper:

• Joe Moeller and Christina Vasilakopoulou, Monoidal Grothendieck construction.

The monoidal Grothendieck construction plays an important role in our team’s work...

Enriched Lawvere Theories

My grad student Christian Williams and I finished this paper just in time for him to talk about it at SYCO:

• John Baez and Christian Williams, Enriched Lawvere theories for operational semantics.

Abstract. Enriched Lawvere theories are a generalization of Lawvere theories that allow us to describe the operational semantics of formal systems. For example, a graph-enriched Lawvere theory describes structures that have a graph of operations of each arity, where the vertices are operations and...

Props in Network Theory (Part 2)

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Here’s my talk for SYCO4 next week:

• Props in network theory.

Abstract. To describe systems composed of interacting parts, scientists and engineers draw diagrams of networks: flow charts, Petri nets, electrical circuit diagrams, signal-flow graphs, chemical reaction networks, Feynman diagrams and the like. All these different diagrams fit into a common framework: the mathematics of symmetric monoidal categories. Two complementary approaches are presentations of props using generators and...

Symposium on Compositional Structures 4: Program

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Here’s the program for this conference:

• Symposium on Compositional Structures 4, 22–23 May, 2019, Chapman University, California.

A lot of my students and collaborators are speaking here! The meeting will take place in Beckman Hall 101.

Wednesday May 22, 2019

• 10:30–11:30 — Registration.

• 11:30–12:30 — John Baez, “Props in Network Theory”.

• 12:30–1:00 — Jade Master, “Generalized Petri Nets”.

• 1:00–2:00 — Lunch.

• 2:00–2:30 — Christian Williams, “Enriched Lawvere Theories for Operati...

Symposium on Compositional Structures 4

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There’s yet another conference in this fast-paced series, and this time it’s in Southern California!

• Symposium on Compositional Structures 4, 22–23 May, 2019, Chapman University, California.

The Symposium on Compositional Structures (SYCO) is an interdisciplinary series of meetings aiming to support the growing community of researchers interested in the phenomenon of compositionality, from both applied and abstract perspectives, and in particular where category theory serves as a unifying...

Hidden Symmetries of the Hydrogen Atom

Here’s the math colloquium talk I gave at Georgia Tech this week:

• Hidden symmetries of the hydrogen atom.

Abstract. A classical particle moving in an inverse square central force, like a planet in the gravitational field of the Sun, moves in orbits that do not precess. This lack of precession, special to the inverse square force, indicates the presence of extra conserved quantities beyond the obvious ones. Thanks to Noether’s theorem, these indicate the presence of extra symmetries. It tu...

The Pi Calculus: Towards Global Computing

 

Check out the video of Christian Williams’’s talk in the Applied Category Theory Seminar here at U. C. Riverside. It was nicely edited by Paola Fernandez and uploaded by Joe Moeller.

Abstract. Historically, code represents a sequence of instructions for a single machine. Each computer is its own world, and only interacts with others by sending and receiving data through external ports. As society becomes more interconnected, this paradigm becomes more inadequate – these virtually isolat...