Given a particle in Euclidean space, a central force is a force that points toward or away from the origin and depends only on the particle’s distance from the origin. If the particle’s position at ...

Mar 2, 2020 The 4th Annual Workshop on String Diagrams in Computation, Logic, and Physics is happening on June 23, 2020 in Bergen, Norway.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Before we go any further, let’s replace topological spaces with their open-set lattices. (For suitably nice topological spaces, this doesn’t lose any information.) This is a good idea since lattices ...

Faster-than-light neutrinos? Boring… let’s see something really revolutionary. Edward Nelson, a math professor at Princeton, is writing a book called Elements in which he claims to prove the ...

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 ...

I have been looking for examples, accessible to a lay audience, to illustrate the prevalence of cohomology. Here are some possibilities: ...

Last summer my students Brendan Fong and Blake Pollard visited me at the Centre for Quantum Technologies, and we figured out how to understand open continuous-time Markov chains! I think this is a ...

The study of monoidal categories and their applications is an essential part of the research and applications of category theory. However, on occasion the coherence conditions of these categories ...

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 — ...