Both kinds of course are valuable. The first is like teaching ETCS via the general notion of category, more or less as in Lawvere and Rosebrugh’s book Sets for Mathematics. The second is like my ...

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’m trying to work out how classical statistical mechanics can reduce to thermodynamics in a certain limit. I sketched out the game plan in Part 1 but there are a lot of details to hammer out. While I ...

Why do I care? As we’ll see later, classical statistical mechanics features a crucial formula that involves a Laplace transform. So it would be great if we could find some parameter β \beta in that ...

Sep 9, 2024 To see classical thermodynamics as a limit of classical statistical mechanics, we want to see the Legendre transform as the limit of some quantity related to a Laplace transform. Here’s a ...

Earlier this month the Mathematics Institute at Uppsala University hosted a conference called Categorification in Algebra and Topology, clearly a theme close to our collective heart. As yet there are ...

May 22, 2009 Charles Wells has a new blog. I especially like the entries on ‘sketches’ and on ‘how “math is logic” ruined mathematics for a generation’. Cobordism and Topological Field Theories Week 5 ...

Jan 26, 2009 A new paper shows how to build the string Lie 2-algebra by taking a compact Lie group with its canonical closed 3-form and then using ideas from multisymplectic geometry.

May 16, 2019 A summary of some ideas from the paper “Monads, partial evaluations and rewriting” by Tobias Fritz and Paolo Perrone. An Operational Semantics of Simply-Typed Lambda Calculus With String ...

Sep 10, 2024 15:21 By the way, I always thought of the “I summed the series” anecdote (about the total distance flown by a ...

organized by Zoran Škoda and Igor Baković.

Physicists like to study all sorts of simplified situations, but here’s one I haven’t seen them discuss. I call it an ‘energy particle’. It’s an imaginary thing with no qualities except energy, which ...