Yesterday I had a great conversation with Dmitri Tymoczko about groupoids in music theory. But at this Higgs Centre Colloquium, he preferred to downplay groupoids and talk in a way physicists would ...

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 ...

Many of you have heard murmurings about this book for several months now. I’m happy to report that it’s now out! Homotopy type theory: univalent foundations of mathematics, by the Univalent ...

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 ...

I move jobs tomorrow: from Glasgow to Edinburgh, city of James Clerk Maxwell, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and Dolly the Sheep. But before I go, I want to give you the fourth and final ...

Back to modal HoTT. If what was considered last time were all, one would wonder what the fuss was about. Now, there’s much that needs to be said about type dependency, types as propositions, sets, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A note to those arriving from the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: my opinion may not have been accurately represented in that article. Please read my whole post and judge for yourself.

Most recently, the Applied Category Theory Seminar took a step into linguistics by discussing the 2010 paper Mathematical Foundations for a Compositional Distributional Model of Meaning, by Bob Coecke ...

Bless British trains. A two-hour delay with nothing to occupy me provided the perfect opportunity to figure out the relationships between some of the results that John, Tobias and I have come up with ...