John C. Baez's Blog, page 64

Voyager 1

Launched 40 years ago, the Voyagers are our longest-lived and most distant spacecraft. Voyager 2 has reached the edge of the heliosphere, the realm where the solar wind and the Sun’s magnetic field live. Voyager 1 has already left the heliosphere and entered interstellar space! A new movie, The Farthest, celebrates the Voyagers’ journey toward the stars:

What has Voyager 1 been doing lately? I’ll skip its amazing exploration of the Solar System….

Leaving the realm of planets

On Februa...

Complex Adaptive System Design (Part 4)

Last time I introduced typed operads. A typed operad has a bunch of operations for putting together things of various types and getting new things of various types. This is a very general idea! But in the CASCADE project we’re interested in something more specific: networks. So we want operads whose operations are ways to put together networks and get new networks.

That’s what our team came up with: John Foley of Metron, my graduate students Blake Pollard and Joseph Moeller, and myself. We’re...

Complex Adaptive System Design (Part 3)

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged about the Complex Adaptive System Composition and Design Environment or CASCADE project run by John Paschkewitz. For a reminder, read these:

• Complex adaptive system design (part 1), Azimuth, 2 October 2016.

• Complex adaptive system design (part 2), Azimuth, 18 October 2016.

A lot has happened since then, and I want to explain it.

I’m working with Metron Scientific Solutions to develop new techniques for designing complex networks.

The particular pro...

Norbert Blum on P versus NP

There’s a new paper on the arXiv that claims to solve a hard problem:

• Norbert Blum, A solution of the P versus NP problem.

Most papers that claim to solve hard math problems are wrong: that’s why these problems are considered hard. But these papers can still be fun to look at, at least if they’re not obviously wrong. It’s fun to hope that maybe today humanity has found another beautiful grain of truth.

I’m not an expert on the P versus NP problem, so I have no opinion on this paper. So don’...

Applied Algebraic Topology 2017

In the comments on this blog post I’ll take some notes on this conference:

• Applied Algebraic Topology 2017, August 8-12, 2017, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan.

The Rise and Spread of Algebraic Topology

People have been using algebraic topology in data analysis these days, so we’re starting to see conferences like this:

• Applied Algebraic Topology 2017, August 8-12, 2017, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan.

I’m giving the first talk at this one. I’ve done a lot of work on applied category theory, but only a bit on on applied algebraic topology. It was tempting to smuggle in some categories, operads and props under the guise of algebraic topology. But decided it would be more useful, as...

A Compositional Framework for Reaction Networks

For a long time Blake Pollard and I have been working on ‘open’ chemical reaction networks: that is, networks of chemical reactions where some chemicals can flow in from an outside source, or flow out. The picture to keep in mind is something like this:

where the yellow circles are different kinds of chemicals and the aqua boxes are different reactions. The purple dots in the sets X and Y are ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’, where certain kinds of chemicals can flow in or out.

Our paper on this st...

Liars and Hypocrites

[image error]

Who do you trust: the liar or the hypocrite?

Some people like to accuse those are worried about climate change of being “hypocrites”. Why? Because we still fly around in planes, drive cars and so on.

What’s the argument? Could it be this?

“If even those folks who claim there’s a problem aren’t willing to do anything about it, it must not really be a problem.”

That argument is invalid. Say we have a married couple who both smoke. The husband says “we should quit smoking.” But he keeps smoking...

Correlated Equilibria in Game Theory

Erica Klarreich is one of the few science journalists who explains interesting things I don’t already know clearly enough so I can understand them. I recommend her latest article:

• Erica Klarreich, In game theory, no clear path to equilibrium, Quanta, 18 July 2017.

Economists like the concept of ‘Nash equilibrium’, but it’s problematic in some ways. This matters for society at large.

In a Nash equilibrium for a multi-player game, no player can improve their payoff by unilaterally changing th...

A Bicategory of Decorated Cospans

My students are trying to piece together general theory of networks, inspired by many examples. A good general theory should clarify and unify these examples. What some people call network theory, I’d just call ‘applied graph invariant theory’: they come up with a way to calculate numbers from graphs, they calculate these numbers for graphs that show up in nature, and then they try to draw conclusions about this. That’s fine as far as it goes, but there’s a lot more to network theory!

There a...