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July 18, 2018
The Duties of a Mathematician
Posted by John Baez
What are the ethical responsibilities of a mathematician? I can think of many, some of which I even try to fulfill, but this document raises one that I have mixed feelings about:
- Ivan Fesenko, Remarks on aspects of pioneering modern mathematics research.
Namely:
The ethical responsibility of mathematicians includes a certain duty, never precisely stated in any formal way, but of course felt by and known to serious researchers: to dedicate an appropriate amount of time to study each new groundbreaking theory or proof in one’s general area. Truly groundbreaking theories are rare, and this duty is not too cumbersome. This duty is especially applicable to researchers who are in the most active research period of their mathematical life and have already senior academic positions. In real life this informal duty can be taken to mean that a reasonable number of mathematicians in each major mathematical country studies such groundbreaking theories.
Compositionality: the Editorial Board
Posted by John Baez
An editorial board has now been chosen for the journal Compositionality, and they’re waiting for people to submit papers.
July 7, 2018
Beyond Classical Bayesian Networks
Posted by John Baez
guest post by Pablo Andres-Martinez and Sophie Raynor
In the final installment of the Applied Category Theory seminar, we discussed the 2014 paper “Theory-independent limits on correlations from generalized Bayesian networks” by Henson, Lal and Pusey.
In this post, we’ll give a short introduction to Bayesian networks, explain why quantum mechanics means that one may want to generalise them, and present the main results of the paper. That’s a lot to cover, and there won’t be a huge amount of category theory, but we hope to give the reader some intuition about the issues involved, and another example of monoidal categories used in causal theory.
July 4, 2018
Symposium on Compositional Structures
Posted by John Baez
There’s a new conference series, whose acronym is pronounced “psycho”. It’s part of the new trend toward the study of “compositionality” in many branches of thought, often but not always using category theory:
- First Symposium on Compositional Structures (SYCO1), School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, 20-21 September, 2018. Organized by Ross Duncan, Chris Heunen, Aleks Kissinger, Samuel Mimram, Simona Paoli, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Pawel Sobocinski and Jamie Vicary.
The Symposium on Compositional Structures is a new interdisciplinary series of meetings aiming to support the growing community of researchers interested in the phenomenon of compositionality, from both applied and abstract perspectives, and in particular where category theory serves as a unifying common language. We welcome submissions from researchers across computer science, mathematics, physics, philosophy, and beyond, with the aim of fostering friendly discussion, disseminating new ideas, and spreading knowledge between fields. Submission is encouraged for both mature research and work in progress, and by both established academics and junior researchers, including students.
More details below! Our very own David Corfield is one of the invited speakers.