Skip to the Main Content

Note:These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards. They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in Mozilla. My best suggestion (and you will thank me when surfing an ever-increasing number of sites on the web which have been crafted to use the new standards) is to upgrade to the latest version of your browser. If that's not possible, consider moving to the Standards-compliant and open-source Mozilla browser.

September 27, 2008

OctoberFest 08

Posted by John Baez

Canada is a great country for category theory — much better than the US, for example. One of their traditions is to have a conference on the subject every October. This year it’ll be held at Concordia University in Montreal:
  • OctoberFest 08, Concordia University, Montreal, October 4–5, 2008.
We can get a sense of what’s going on in Canadian category theory by looking at the program…
This is just a tentative program; it may change:

Saturday, 4 October - morning session
9:15-9:45 Michael Makkai Revisiting the coherence theory for bicategories and tricategories
9:45-10:15 Victor HarnikPlaced composition in higher dimensional categories
coffee break
10:45-11:15 Walter Tholen Towards an enriched understanding of Hausdorff and Gromov metrics
11:15-11:45 Claudio Hermida TBA
11:45-12:15 Michael Warren Types and groupoids
lunch
afternoon session, in honour of Philip J. Scott
2:00-2:30 Pieter Hofstra From poset to quantifier
2:30-3:00 Robin Cockett Differentiation, linear matters, and other discussions from the Green Door
3:00-3:30 Joachim Lambek In praise of quaternions
coffee break
4:00-4:30 Brian Redmond Safe recursion revisited
4:30-4:50 Jeffrey Morton 2-vector spaces and finite groupoids
4:50-5:10 Telyn Kusalik The Continuum Hypothesis in topos theory and algebraic set theory
5:10-5:30 Rory Lucyshyn-Wright TBA
5:30-6:00 G. Lukacs TBA
6:00-6:20 Cyrus Nourani Functorial parallel worlds model computations
free evening
 
Sunday, 5 October
9:00-9:30 Noson Yanofsky On the algorithmic informational content of categories
9:30-10:00 Susan Niefield Par-valued lax functors and exponentiability
10:00-10:30 André Joyal TBA
coffee break
11:00-11:30 Gavin Seal Kock-Zöberlein monads from monads on SET
11:30-12:00 Dorette Pronk Translation groupoids and orbifold homotopy theory
12:00-12:30 John Kennison Spectra for symbolic dynamics
12:30-1:00 Peter Freyd TBA

I’m very happy that my student Jeffrey Morton is talking about his work on finite groupoids and 2-vector spaces.
Posted at September 27, 2008 10:07 PM UTC

TrackBack URL for this Entry:   https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/cgi-bin/MT-3.0/dxy-tb.fcgi/1803

3 Comments & 1 Trackback

Re: OctoberFest 08

I can’t come. Each time I ask our administration to give me time off and funding to go to the Oktoberfest their reaction is very unsupportive…

(This is a joke. But I can’t come anyway. However, I do wonder if calling a conference “OctoberFest” is meant to sound funny, as certainly it does in one part of this world. )

Posted by: Urs Schreiber on September 28, 2008 4:32 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: OctoberFest 08

I think it’s meant to sound funny. Category theorists have a certain sense of humor regarding their conference names. Ross Street’s 60th birthday conference was called the StreetFest, which is also a pun. And then there’s the Peripatetic Seminar on Sheaves and Logic, or PSSL — when people pronounce this, it sounds like pissle.

There’s an obvious joke to be made, combining the words “OctoberFest” and “pissle”.

Posted by: John Baez on September 28, 2008 6:01 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: OctoberFest 08

I think funny is a stretch. I take it as a name that resonates and stays in memory and indicates a tradition.

Posted by: jim stasheff on September 29, 2008 2:10 PM | Permalink | Reply to this
Read the post Freely Generated ω-Categories
Weblog: The n-Category Café
Excerpt: The notion of strict infinity-categories which are "freely generated".
Tracked: October 14, 2008 12:36 PM

Post a New Comment