Whenever someone says “quick question”, I’m unable to give them a quick answer. Is that the case here?

You can classify representations of simple Lie groups using Dynkin diagrams, but you can also classify representations of ‘classical’ Lie groups using Young diagrams. Hermann Weyl wrote a whole book ...

I’ve been blogging a bit about medieval math, physics and astronomy over on Azimuth. I’ve been writing about medieval attempts to improve Aristotle’s theory that velocity is proportional to force, ...

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’ve just arXived my notes for Edinburgh’s undergraduate Galois theory course, which I taught from 2021 to 2023. I first shared the notes on my website some time ago. But it took me a while to arXiv ...

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 ...

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 ...

such that the following 5 5 diagrams commute: (for f: x 0 → x 1 f:x_0\to x_1 and y ∈ 풞 y\in\mathcal{C}, we write f ⊗ y f\otimes y to mean f ⊗ id y: x 0 ⊗ y → x 1 ⊗ y f\otimes\operatorname{id}_y: ...

String diagrams are ubiquitous in applied category theory. They originate as a graphical notation for representing terms in monoidal categories and since their origins, they have been used not just as ...

This is part two of a three part series of expository posts on our paper Displayed Type Theory and Semi-Simplicial Types. In this part, we cover the main results of the paper.

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 ...

These are notes for the talk I’m giving at the Edinburgh Category Theory Seminar this Wednesday, based on work with Joe Moeller and Todd Trimble. (No, the talk will not be recorded.) They still have ...