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 ...

Over the last few years, I’ve been very slowly working up a short expository paper — requiring no knowledge of categories — on set theory done categorically. It’s now progressed to the stage where I’d ...

The discussion on Tom’s recent post about ETCS, and the subsequent followup blog post of Francois, have convinced me that it’s time to write a new introductory blog post about type theory. So if ...

Freeman Dyson is a famous physicist who has also dabbled in number theory quite productively. If some random dude said the Riemann Hypothesis was connected to quasicrystals, I’d probably dismiss him ...

Most of us learnt as undergraduates that from an n × m n\times m-matrix M M you get two linear maps M: ℝ m → ℝ n M\colon \mathbb{R}^{m}\to \mathbb{R}^{n} and M T: ℝ n → ℝ m M^{\text{T}} \colon \mathbb ...

It’s an underappreciated fact that the interior of every simplex Δ n \Delta^n is a real vector space in a natural way. For instance, here’s the 2-simplex with twelve of its 1-dimensional linear ...

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 ...

When is it appropriate to completely reinvent the wheel? To an outsider, that seems to happen a lot in category theory, and probability theory isn’t spared from this treatment. We’ve had a useful ...

I want to go back over something from Part 11, but in a more systematic and self-contained way. I’m stating these facts roughly now, to not get bogged down. But I’ll state them precisely, prove them, ...

We start by introducing Petri nets and elementary Petri nets, which will be the focus of this post. In general, the weight of each condition can be an integer. In the case of elementary Petri nets, ...

On Mathstodon, Robin Houston pointed out a video where Oded Margalit claimed that it’s an open problem why this integral: So, a bunch of us tried to figure out what was going on. Jaded ...

Things equal to the same thing are also equal to one another. And if equal things are added to equal things then the wholes are equal. And if equal things are subtracted from equal things then the ...