Despite the “2” in the title, you can follow this post without having read part 1. The whole point is to sneak up on the metricky, analysisy stuff about potential functions from a categorical angle, ...

In the beginning, there were hardly any spaces whose magnitude we knew. Line segments were about the best we could do. Then Mark Meckes introduced the technique of potential functions for calculating ...

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, ...

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 keep wanting to understand Bernoulli numbers more deeply, and people keep telling me stuff that’s fancy when I want to understand things simply. But let me try again.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...