are isomorphisms. Definition. A symmetric 2-rig is a 2-rig whose underlying monoidal category is a symmetric monoidal category. One can work through the details of these definitions and show the ...

These are some lecture notes for a 4 1 2 \frac {1} {2} -hour minicourse I’m teaching at the Summer School on Algebra at the Zografou campus of the National Technical University of Athens. To save time ...

Of all the permutation groups, only S6 S_6 has an outer automorphism. This puts a kind of ‘wrinkle’ in the fabric of mathematics, which would be nice to explore using category theory. For starters, ...

At the Topos Institute this summer, a group of folks started talking about thermodynamics and category theory. It probably started because Spencer Breiner and my former student Joe Moeller, both ...

In week241 of This Week’s Finds, you can follow me on my tour of the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-Wave Observatory in Louisiana: Also hear some tales of the dodecahedron… from the pyritohedron ...

When we’ve got a discrete topological group G — or in other words, just a plain old group — we usually call the classifying space of G an Eilenberg–Mac Lane space K(G, 1). This may alternatively be ...

The math-blogosphere is abuzz with interest in the new Math Overflow, a mathematics questions and answers site. Already we at the Café have been helped with the answer to a query on the Fourier ...

In the pi calculus, there are mailboxes, each with a name like x. You should think of the name x like the key to open the mailbox–if you don’t have the key, you can’t deposit or withdraw messages.

Update 21 May 2004 I have found out by now that what I was trying to argue here has already been found long ago in papers on background independence of string field theory. For instance on p.2 of ...

Week 1 (Oct. 3) - How the dynamics of p-branes resembles the statics of (p+1)-branes. Cool. That touches upon many things that I have been thinking about lately. Let me propose this general way of ...

Merry Christmas! It’s still Christmas here in California, despite what the time stamp on this blog may say. So, it’s not too late for one last present! Here’s one just for you, from Santa and his ...

A while back Gina asked why computer scientists should be interested in categories. Maybe you categorical computer scientists out there have your own favorite answers to this? I’d be glad to hear them ...