New Blog
Posted by David Corfield
I was wondering when Lamarck would be proved right and John’s (academic) children would show his acquired characteristic of wanting to broadcast over the Web. Now Jeff Morton has begun to blog at Theoretical Atlas.
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September 28, 2007
Posted at September 28, 2007 1:08 PM UTC
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Re: New Blog
David, thanks for mentioning these two new blogs and you may want to consider adding them to the links section of the n-Category Cafe. Also, thanks to you, John and Urs for hosting this cafe.
Speaking of something new, perhaps you or some readers of this blog could please assist me with this question:
I know an engineering professor who wants me to help him write up his new algebraic approach to engineering via category theory. Do you know of any journals that might be receptive to such a paper? I am asking because he thought that we might want to tailor the format of the paper to fit the format of the particular journal. Thanks.
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Charlie Stromeyer Jr on September 28, 2007 2:38 PM | Permalink
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Re: New Blog
Hi, David. Thanks for the reference - although I hope nobody expects me to acquire John’s prolificness as well - that takes amazing energy. But there should be a few things happening soon that I’ll want to mention there.
Interestingly, I, too, only discovered Mike’s blog yesterday. He has a lot of great material on it.
Re: New Blog
My blog has only been mentioned here three times. Unless you read every message in every thread, it’s unlikely that you would have seen the references.
I imagine that, at the moment, the blog will be of most interest to the people who hide under the tablecloths here at the cafe and just listen to the conversations. I’m trying to make my category theory tutorial as slow and as friendly as possible, with lots of pictures and concrete examples. If something isn’t clear, please let me know and I’ll update the post.
Re: New Blog
In the spirit of our forthcoming “Rosetta stone” paper and in the interest of making category theory comprehensible to more and more people, I’ve just posted “Category theory for the Java programmer.”
It assumes you’ve been trained as a programmer, not necessarily a computer scientist or mathematician.
Re: New Blog
So that’s the paper John mentioned about symmetric monoidal closed categories in logic, topology, and physics.
Was André Weil first to the use of “Rosetta stone” in mathematics? (See first addendum of TWF198.
Perhaps I’m biased in favour of group blogs, but might there be a rationale for a ‘Children of Baez’ blog. Just think, along with the harnessing of the efforts of you and Jeff, you could try to rope in Derek, Aaron, Toby, Alissa,…
Re: New Blog
I doubt a ‘children of Baez’ blog would work, since — believe it or not — my students have very different personalities and probably want very different blogs (or in some cases, no blog at all).
But, if any of them want to post about math, I’d be very happy for them to do it here. It would probably increase their readership, since I’ve discovered in my travels that lots of people read this blog — more than I thought. They could also post those math articles on their own blogs, of course.
For starters, I wish Jeff Morton would post his series on spans here.
It may sound silly to post the same thing in two places instead of just giving a link — but that neglects something about human psychology: the sense of “territory”.
Re: New Blog
For starters, I wish Jeff Morton would post his series on spans here.
Well, he can’t do it automatically, since only admins are allowed to post here. You could ask his permission to repost it here.
During the von Neumann conference, you mentioned doing that you wanted to do that with my category theory introduction articles. You’re welcome to do so for anything I write on my blog, as long as you add a comment to my blog linking here.
Re: New Blog
Mike wrote:
Well, he can’t do it automatically, since only admins are allowed to post here.
Right, but we have a mechanism that allows ‘guest posts’, like the recent posts by Todd Trimble.
You’re welcome to do so for anything I write on my blog, as long as you add a comment to my blog linking here.
Okay, great! Your introductions to category theory would be very nice to have here.
Of course I’d really like you to make them into one or more guest posts — relieving me of the obligation to copy your posts and translate them into one of the TeX dialects we use here.
But: how similar is your blog source code to the stuff we use here, e.g. in the comments you’ve posted here? If they’re similar, it’d be no big deal for me to do the necessary translation.
Re: New Blog
Right, but we have a mechanism that allows ‘guest posts’
I’ve seen the guest posts, but I always figured someone just sent you an email and you posted it for them.
But: how similar is your blog source code to the stuff we use here, e.g. in the comments you’ve posted here? If they’re similar, it’d be no big deal for me to do the necessary translation.
I just previewed one of my posts; the only changes that need to be made are “latex ” => “” and insert line breaks after some tags (posting with markdown with itex to mathml).
Re: New Blog
Mike, there may have been a couple more readers coming your way recently. I’ve been teaching a category theory course, and your blog is on the “recommended reading” list. But the class size is only seven, so it’s unlikely to show up on your stats.
(I’d include a link to the course web page, but unfortunately the university uses a system that makes course pages inaccessible without a university login. Grrr.)
Re: New Blog
Tom wrote:
I’d include a link to the course web page, but unfortunately the university uses a system that makes course pages inaccessible without a university login. Grrr.
Grrr indeed!
Maybe you could shame your administrators into fixing the system. For example, you could ask them: is the University of Glasgow really determined to make itself invisible to the world at large? If you ask sufficiently high-level people, they may realize the only sensible answer is no.
Or, you could do what I do: keep course material on your own website, so you can make it available to the world.
It would be annoying if your university turned out to have a profit-driven motive for preventing you from doing this. Mine doesn’t: they don’t care if all you freeloaders read my lecture notes, so long as you don’t claim to deserve free PhDs from UCR.
Re: New Blog
How come I didn’t know Mike Stay has a blog, too? Reperiendi, from Reperio. Sounds like something out of Harry Potter.